Posted on Tony Blair, UK

beckett’s delusion

I have been watching with great interest the evolution of the Labour party since Tony Blair came to power in 1997. Blair’s victory was proof that one could, with enough charm and personal charisma, convince the British people to buy into a more palatable version of the socialism that was the foundation of Old Labour. Of course, like the American mid-term elections, it may have had more to do with dissatisfaction with the ruling Conservative party than a mandate for the policies of Labour. It’s all in the interpretation, I suppose.

The Iraq war raised Blair’s profile a great deal in the United States when he decided that the UK would support the invasion of Iraq, and not only support it, but also be a passionate defender of that war. This was a unique position for a Labour prime minister to take, since the Labour party has always had the same Achilles heel as the Democrats when it comes to being soft on war. Even though I suspect that the delay and the appeals to the UN were Blair’s price for that support, he still took a political risk for his support of the war, and he deserves credit for this. The international community made the decision that Saddam needed to be dealt with, but they did not have the will to stop him. We can argue all day long about whether Saddam was a threat or not, or whether those WMDs ever existed. The point is that we can’t afford to make a mistake about Iran and its intentions.

What we already know about Iran is scary enough. The delusion that Iran only has good intentions (if only the US, the UK, and the West would stop aggravating those peace-loving mullahs) is a very dangerous one, and we must not get sucked in to their games. I thought that Blair understood the threat of Iran, but I’m not sure his Foreign Secretary does. Margaret Beckett is still trying to convince the British people that the release of the British hostages was some kind of victory for diplomacy.

She says:

This was a victory for patient and determined diplomacy. We got our people out, unharmed, and we got them out relatively quickly. That has to be the measure of success.

In going down this route, we have shown that those who confused diplomacy with weakness were wrong in their analysis and wrong in their advice.

By building support among our allies and Iran’s neighbours, we put a consistent squeeze on the Iranian regime.

In the end, its best option was to look for a way out from an unhappy situation of its own making.

Propaganda wars are winnable without bloodshed, madam Secretary, and Iran has claimed the first round. While I am not suggesting the correct response would have been to bomb Iran, surely there was a solution between concessions and military action. Iran will continue to defy the will of the majority of the international community, including the best intent of the UN, and nothing will happen to them.  That’s the lesson Iran learned from their little stunt, and we must reverse this trend toward appeasing the dangerous, or worse things will happen than the kidnapping of a few British sailors.

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2 Comments Posted on Democrats, Liberals

“alternative foreign policy”

that’s how representative tom lantos (d-san mateo) has described his diplomatic efforts with speaker pelosi to syria, and now this successful duo is considering bringing their road show to misunderstood iran. but wait a second…i thought that pelosi and her delegation were merely passing on the views of the bush administration. that’s what pelosi has said she was doing. no harm in that right? it shouldn’t be a secret at this point that speaker pelosi doesn’t approve of the way the bush administration is handling foreign policy, and especially iraq. if that’s the case, then what would be the point of pushing said foreign policy (which she derides as a “poverty of ideas“) in meetings with assad (and possibly ahmedinejad)? the bush administration has made its case why syria isn’t interested in making the kind of concessions the united states wants it to make in order to facilitate any serious negotiation between the two countries. now there are more reports that iran is actively helping the iraqi insurgency. these two countries aren’t interested in concessions unless the concessions are made by the united states. this shouldn’t be a hard concept to grasp, even for democrats like pelosi.

i am not suggesting that pelosi did something unprecedented in taking meetings with foreign heads of state without the approval of the white house, but it does raise a few red flags for me because of lantos’ comments about having an “alternative foreign policy”. it wouldn’t make sense for her to push what she sees as failed administration policies, so what exactly is she discussing with assad? i think it’s fair to ask questions about that, and if there are transcripts and audio clips available of their discussion that prove pelosi’s claims about that conversation, then there is no reason why we shouldn’t be able to get them and decide for ourselves.

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Posted on Tony Blair, UK

european diplomacy

i don’t think the resolution of the british hostage situation was any kind of success for diplomacy. if so, iran certainly didn’t get that message.

here’s why (hat tip: lgf):

Hardliners in the Iranian regime have warned that the seizure of British naval personnel demonstrates that they can make trouble for the West whenever they want to and do so with impunity.

The bullish reaction from Teheran will reinforce the fears of western diplomats and military officials that more kidnap attempts may be planned.

The British handling of the crisis has been regarded with some concern in Washington, and a Pentagon defence official told The Sunday Telegraph: “The fear now is that this could be the first of many. If the Brits don’t change their rules of engagement, the Iranians could take more hostages almost at will.

“Iran has come out of this looking reasonable. If I were the Iranians, I would keep playing the same game. They have very successfully muddied the waters and bought themselves some more time. And in parts of the Middle East they will be seen as the good guys. They could do it time and again if they wanted to.”

Americans also expressed dismay that the British had suspended boarding operations in the Gulf while its tactics are reassessed.

iran knew exactly what it was doing, and the release of the british hostages had nothing to do with anything tony blair said to ahmedinejad. surely prime minister blair is smart enough to know this, but for some reason he chose to go along with iran’s propaganda stunt. iran has done this before, and if they continue to get away with kidnapping people without any reprecussions, there’s no reason to believe that they won’t do it again in the future. iran learned that no country is willing to hold them accountable for their behavior, and that the UN won’t be able to stop whatever they want to do. this is a dangerous path we are on with iran.

it would be bad enough if iran kept kidnapping foreign sailors for propaganda purposes, but now they will have nukes too, and the UN will not stop them.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Monday the country’s nuclear fuel production program had reached “industrial” levels, setting Tehran on a fresh collision course with Western governments over its atomic ambitions.

A U.S. State Department spokesman said the announcement was “another signal Iran is in defiance of the international community.” Iran has already faced United Nations sanctions over its refusal to back down from developing nuclear fuel.

“Iran has succeeded in development to attain production at an industrial level,” said Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, addressing an audience at the Natanz nuclear facility as part of a ceremony marking the anniversary of the start of uranium enrichment at the plant.

“With great pride, I announce that as of today, our dear country, Iran, is among the countries of the world that produces the industrial level of nuclear fuel.”

Ahmadinejad vowed the fuel would be used for energy, “and for the expansion of peace and stability.”

it’s to our credit, i guess, that we are not buying the argument that iran will only use nuclear fuel for energy. we have been here before. the question is: what should we do next? if i’m the leader of a country with a stake in the outcome of this, i would insist on independent inspectors to keep tabs on iran and their progress to ensure that iran is only producing this nuclear material for peaceful purposes. i would also send to the UN a proposal for penalties to be assessed for non-compliance. the problem is that there seems to be no indication that the UN could credibly threaten iran, especially based on what we have seen from the UN in the past.

europe better wake up to the threat iran poses, or iran will continue to defy the international community and suffer no consequences for that defiance.

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11 Comments Posted on '08 Election, Republicans

romney on hannity and colmes

sean hannity interviews governor romney:

HANNITY: What do you think about Speaker of the House Pelosi, against the will of the White House, the recommendation of the State Department, is going to Syria to meet with the Syrian president? Is that the wrong thing to do? Does that send the wrong message to the world?

ROMNEY: It’s outrageous. What she’s doing is absolutely outrageous. I’m afraid she has been taking John Edwards’s talk to heart, which is that there are two Americas, one led by the president and the other, which is led by her.

But there is one America. It’s the United States of America. We have one foreign policy. If people don’t agree with that foreign policy, they can elect new leaders. They can elect a new president in two years, and they can pursue a different course.

i love this. governor romney is exactly right, and this is what it boils down to here. congress doesn’t have the role of commander-in-chief. if they want that role, they have to get a democratic president elected. the democrats are in danger of overstepping their constitutional role by any freelance foreign policy they are doing, so speaker pelosi and her bipartisan delegation need to be careful that the United States speaks with one voice to terrorist-supporting states like Syria and Saudi Arabia.

he continues:

But the idea of having the speaker of the House, the third person in line for the presidency, of the United States, being with Assad, being welcomed and given diplomatic coverage, shots of her on TV and the media and the way she’s being used by the Arab press is just outrageous.

HANNITY: Let me go to the issue of Harry Reid earlier this week said, in fact, he would support Russ Feingold’s bill to defund the war in Iraq within 120 days of its passage if, in fact, the president goes forward with his threat to veto the supplemental that was loaded up with pork and, of course, this artificial timetable, as the president says?

How should the president react to that and what do you say to Senator Reid for that proposal? That basically guarantees defeat.

ROMNEY: Well, it’s a terrible idea. And again, I think people are playing politics with foreign policy.

No one likes the fact that we’re still in Iraq. Everybody wants our troops home as soon as they possibly can be home. But people who have studied it very carefully and put politics aside recognize that if we simply withdraw on a precipitous basis, we open a risk of a very substantial nature to America’s interests.

The risk is that Iran, the nation we just were speaking about, grabs the Shia south of Iraq, that al Qaeda plays a dominant role among the Sunnis, that the Kurds destabilize the border with Turkey, and that potentially from any one of these acts that we end up with a regional conflict. And that our friends like Israel get drawn in, and then America has to go back in a far more difficult position.

These are the consequences of improper departure from Iraq, and so we have to make sure that we — we manage to the extent humanly possible this process to maintain order and a decree of stability we don’t let this country to fall in complete and total collapse.

HANNITY: If that were to come to fruition, Iran and al Qaeda would also have the oil reserves in Iraq, which would create the financing as they, you know, basically have a new staging area for terror.

ROMNEY: The people in Congress, and the people of America have to recognize that you’ve got to separate our disappointment and, in some cases, anger with where we are in Iraq. We made a lot of mistakes. Look, this has not been — once we knocked down Saddam Hussein, the war has not been conducted perfectly by any means.

We are, to a certain degree, responsible for the mess we find ourselves in. But as long as there’s a reasonable probability that a pathway exists for us to maintain a central government in Iraq, with a central military, albeit with strong sub-states, that’s a pathway which is in the best interest of America.

governor romney had a very strong interview here, in my opinion. what i’m still trying to understand about romney is why he feels the need to not only support conservative positions like gun rights, but also to insist that he has always been the strongest supporter of those positions. romney’s strengths and weaknesses will always be competing for the public’s attention. rudy guiliani has never been a favorite of the SoCons, but at least he is what he is: a strong supporter of abortion (even public funding of abortions) and gay marriage.

let me pass along some free advice for mitt romney: what conservatives want to know is whether you will do what you say you will do when in office. i think you are trying too hard to sell yourself as the most committed conservative candidate in the field. i’m not sure that this will work for you, based on your past history. we want to be able to trust you. don’t go to extremes to impress us. be who you are. that just might be enough to get the nomination.

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1 Comment Posted on Tony Blair, UK

kidnapped. not rightfully stolen.

iran has released the british hostages. president mahmoud ahmedinejad says that even though these british sailors deserve to go on trial, he is willing to forgive them and set them free as a “gift” to the british people. sure. why not? he has gotten what he wanted out of this kidnapping, and has proven britain’s new weakness.

i agree with this NRO editorial:

…If there is a glimmer of hope in this shameful denouement, it is the possibility that the sheer brazenness of the kidnappings will shatter some of the widespread naïveté — particularly in the British and American diplomatic corps — about the nature of the Iranian regime. It has never been reasonable to think that this regime, whose guiding purpose is to export its particular brand of Islamism, could be made to act in accordance with the West’s interests. Its latest exercise in hostage-taking-as-foreign-policy underscores the unreasonableness of that view.

It’s right to be glad that the young Britons are headed home. But into that humanitarian feeling irrupts the darker realization that their good fortune comes at an unacceptable price. Unless Britain and her allies act quickly and cleverly to show that they are, appearances notwithstanding, powers to be reckoned with, a great many lives will be at risk for a long time to come.

if we are waiting for this incident to wake up europe and britain to the untrustworthiness of the government in tehran, we better pack a lunch, because it’s not going to happen any time soon. this whole affair doesn’t reflect well on prime minister tony blair, but i’m not sure how much differently the situation would have been handled under the leadership of gordon brown or david cameron. europe has a serious problem with being tough on islamic radicals, and they need to recognize that, and deal with that problem before something more serious happens.

5 Comments Posted on Baseball, Ohio State Buckeyes

spring is officially here

it doesn’t really start until first pitch of baseball’s opening night, you know. 🙂

the mets had a pretty good opening night, when they got a little revenge on the world champion cardinals and ace chris carpenter. i don’t know how the rest of the series will go, but i like the way it started. as a mets fan, i hope that what we saw from john maine and oliver perez in the NLCS will carry over to the 2007 season. after glavine, there are many question marks in the rest of the rotation. pedro’s not ready to go, and who knows what el duque will bring to the table this year? so the best thing to do for mets fans is take the season one game at a time, and hope that the team can get on a good roll (and that we don’t lose glavine to injury).

i like ESPN’s predictions of the division winners, but i think i’m going to let the season play out and possibly be surprised about how it ends (just as long as the mets win the NL east).

not that this has anything to with baseball, but i am pleased that kenny mayne has re-appeared on sportscenter. good job by espn. less stuart scott, more kenny mayne. that’s what i say anyway.

for those who actually have monday off, enjoy opening day. i’ll just max out the DVR and watch it later.

BTW, i’m rooting for the buckeyes to upset florida in the national championship game. i don’t expect it to happen, but i’m not making any predictions either way. 🙂

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Posted on '08 Election, Conservatives, Republicans

this can’t be good for mccain

the republican party almost lost their maverick back in 2001. you can characterize arlen specter and chuck hagel as apostates for their occasional straying off the republican reservation, but the one thing you can’t say is that they seriously considered leaving the republican party. (maybe we sometimes wish they would, but it hasn’t happened.) to be fair about it, the article doesn’t say that mccain would have become a democrat, but becoming an independent would have had the same effect on the senate.

this is a more serious flaw than romney supporting democratic candidates, or guiliani and his judicial picks. if mcain is bidding to be the “one true republican” then he’s got to come up with a good explanation for this. there doesn’t seem to be one. frustration with the republican party is perfectly normal, but the way to deal with that is not to look for an escape hatch. whatever his reasons were for having even preliminary conversations with the democrats, he risks being tagged a sore loser since this happened so soon after the 2000 elections. that charge is already out there.

mccain was in trouble before this story came out, and i don’t know what he would have to do to catch and pass giuliani in the polls. could it happen? sure, but he’s got a lot of work to do. it wouldn’t surprise me if romney passes mccain. if it happens, you can say you read it here first.

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Posted on Conservatives

bad news for the snowman

snow.jpg

white house press secretary tony snow’s cancer has returned. cnn’s expert gives a gloomy forecast, but anyone who has watched this guy deal with cancer wouldn’t be likely to doubt his will and determination to beat it. tony snow has always been one of my favorite conservatives. he’s a classy guy and is respected on both sides of the aisle politically. i hope that the left will join with the right in their support of snow as he continues to battle cancer. my thoughts and prayers are with tony snow and his family at this time. tony snow is a fighter and i expect nothing less from him now.

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11 Comments Posted on Democrats, George W. Bush, Republicans

attorney-gate

The firing of eight US attorneys was handled badly – the left and right can both agree on this. That said, Bush and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales had the right to fire them. There are a few cases where you could make the argument that it was politically motivated. After reading piles and piles of information on this case, I’m still not sure who’s right – whether these US attorneys deserved to lose their jobs or whether they didn’t. This is still a lose-lose for the administration. If these were perfectly competent attorneys, then no matter what kind of spin you put on it, there’s definitely a discrepancy between what the AG and Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty have said on this matter. Somebody lied, or under the most charitable interpretation, one of the two was misinformed. Either way, it doesn’t make the administration look all that good.

In a Salon article written by Mark Folman, it’s alleged that the firings were politically motivated. It’s interesting to me that the salon article doesn’t put any names to the allegations that the firings were politically motivated except for David Iglesias (one of the former US attorneys who has spoken out), only referencing “senior Justice Department officials” and so forth. If the allegations came from someone other than McNulty, that’s one thing. But if McNulty has already claimed this, then wouldn’t the anonymity be blown already with his public statements? The only conclusion we can draw from this is that there are others who are not willing to go on the record with their claims. That’s certainly understandable. However, I have a harder time believing unnamed random sources whose stories cannot be verified. The article in Salon also points out that federal appointments are never apolitical. So what exactly is the problem again? It’s not that Gonzales fired the attorneys, it’s that all parties involved in the decision gave different reasons for why these US attorney lost their jobs.

Given that information, it’s easy to jump to the conclusion that there might be some kind of cover-up or scandal here. That’s not the case. Both sides don’t trust each other. Congress doesn’t trust the administration to give them the straight story on anything. The Bush administration, likewise, doesn’t trust the Democratic-controlled Congress. There are good reasons for this distrust, especially from the Bush administration. The Democrats, easily distracted from their mission of making America more dependent on government charity and bravely ordering the retreat from Iraq as well as wiping out poverty, have gotten bored with the actual policy-making their job requires, and have decided to investigate the heck out of anyone remotely associated with the President of the United States. Because, ya know…they might eventually find something.

It’s never the seriousness of the offense, but rather the seriousness of the charge. That’s all that matters to the Democrats. Karl Rove must have done something wrong…darned if we know what it is. They couldn’t pin any of the Libby stuff on him, but that’s only because he is such an evil genius and gets away with everything. If he had done even half of what he’s accused of doing, he would be very scary indeed.

I am opposed to fishing expeditions. They were wrong in the past and they are wrong now. That’s a good reason, I think, for the President’s hesitation on allowing Karl Rove to give testimony to Congress. There have been no limits set on what they can ask him, and what’s to prevent Democrats from asking him questions, not only about attorney-gate but about the Scooter Libby trial? These Dems won’t rest until they get a scalp from this administration. Like I said before, I don’t blame Bush for not wanting to offer up Karl Rove to the wolves under those circumstances.

On the other hand, there are legitimate questions about how this whole thing was handled, and Congress deserves answers about that. So if Congress wishes to ask questions about this matter, I don’t see the problem. Talk to the AG. Talk to the Deputy AG. Talk to the folks actually involved in the hiring/ firing decisions at Justice. Somebody needs to be accountable for this, but I’m not sure the bulk of the blame rests with Karl Rove. However, if I were the President, I would have to ask that the inquiry be limited to this particular subject. Frankly, there’s no way this happens if the Dems get Karl Rove under oath.

The Democrats don’t have a legitimate reason to impeach Bush or Cheney. They also don’t have much of a case against Karl Rove, even though they may think that they do. There is more of a reason to question Alberto Gonzales, and I think it’s only right that he answer those questions. But as abhorrent as the idea may be to call for the resignation of Alberto Gonzales, I think it’s the right thing to do. There is more than one reason why he was never the right guy to be Attorney General, and this incident only serves to illustrate why many Republicans had reservations about him from the beginning. Of course this means the Democrats get their victory, but keeping Alberto Gonzales on as Attorney General at this point will do more harm than good for the administration.

Posted on '08 Election, Democrats

elizabeth edwards

first of all, i can’t imagine what the edwards family is going through right now. we can disagree with john edwards’ politics, but when finding out that his wife’s cancer has reappeared and that her condition is incurable, there’s only one response to this. that response is to express support for them, and to hope and pray for the best for their family. a situation like this requires many hard choices, and john and elizabeth edwards made the decision together to go forward with his presidential campaign. i agree with this decision, even though i understand the opposing argument. it’s easy for us to say that of course we would stop the campaign immediately if we were in john edwards’ shoes, but it’s not our choice to make.

video here.

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