What does the US-Iraq Pact mean for the anti-war movement? It certainly may cement an American perception that the war is finally over, stranding the peace movement as public opinion turns its attention to the economy and the Obama administration.

The agreement forces the Bush Administration and Pentagon to back down from long-held positions, especially over deadlines. The barracking of American troops in remote areas by June 2009 will be a retreat from offensive operations. More important, the language of the agreement in Arabic stipulates that all American forces, not merely combat units, will be withdrawn by 2011.

If these terms are maintained, President-elect Obama will be acquiescing in a doubling of his 16 month deadline for withdrawal of combat troops, but also for the first time accepting a date for removal of the so-called residual American forces - since "all" means all counter-terrorism units, advisers, trainers and back-up forces that could total 50,000 or more.

Because shrugging off treaty obligations is a custom of state, only informed publics and alert parliamentarians in Washington and Baghdad can ensure that these agreements are implemented.

This is not "out now", but that was never possible politically or militarily. It's not literally "ending the war in 2009" as Obama promised. But this pact is officially known as "the withdrawal agreement" to all proud Iraqis. Read carefully, it is an agreed 2009 timetable for ending the war, the occupation, the troop presence and closing the military bases in three years.

What's wrong with this picture?

Read more »

Yeah, the stock meltdown of 401Ks is making the Bush-McCain proposals for social security privatization look idiotic, but the Wall Street Journal of all places has a nice quantification of how valuable social security is for most families:

The U.S. government pledges that you will receive those payments, adjusted for inflation, for as long as you live...This kind of bond has a name: an inflation-adjusted immediate annuity...The implicit bond of Social Security makes up about 40% of the total assets of the average household on the verge of retirement...

So most families have the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of dollars in assets that are untouched by the financial crisis.

Read more »

Hot damn! I am very excited today.

A book, America and the World: Conversations on the Future of American Foreign Policy that I was very involved in helping to hatch made it to Michiko Kakutani's top 10 list for books from 2008.

And to top off a great day, my colleague and friend Steve Coll's The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century also made the cut.

Read more »

I appreciate Charles Homans' concerns regarding the unintended consequences of criminal investigation and prosecution. The fear of an excessively restricted executive, however, does not seem to me to be one of those consequences. To the extent that the Vice President was the moving force behind most, if not all, of the abusive policies in question, it was Cheney's belief that an already enormously powerful executive had been crippled and weakened by post-Watergate constraints, and his goal was to undo the "damage" that he believed had been done in the '70s. Every power grab, dubious legal argument and end-run around the rule of law in this administration stems in no small part from the bizarre view that the imperial presidency was too limited in what it was allowed to do. This was his view during a period when the executive branch already possessed overwhelming supremacy, particularly in the sphere of national security that we are discussing here.

Professor Andrew Bacevich has identified in his book The Limits of Power what he calls the "ideology of national security," which he argues has been a common feature of postwar administrations to provide a "highly elastic rationale for action" and which is used mainly to "legitimate the exercise of executive power." Cheney's view of a weakened executive that needed to be bolstered by evading or eliminating constraints on action is an example of this ideology taken to its logical extreme, but the adherents of this ideology are not limited to the defenders of this administration's policies. One of the unintended services that this administration has rendered is to show how the cloak of national security can be so easily used to pernicious and counterproductive ends, and why we should be much more reluctant to loosen restraints on the executive than to tighten them. Beyond the immediate question of how the administration's acts should be investigated, there is a great need for reassessing our readiness to defer to the executive in the name of national security.

Read more »

Just before the election, Michael Porter, the Harvard Business School expert of competitiveness, wrote an article for Business Week entitled Why America Needs an Economic Strategy. Although this would seem to be obvious, Porter points out that for 30 years we have not had such a strategy.

America's political system, especially as it has evolved in recent times, almost guarantees an absence of strategic thinking at the federal level. Government leaders react to current events piecemeal, rather than developing a strategy that unfolds over years.

Read more »

Back when President Bush wanted to privatize Social Security he visited the office in West Virginia where the government bonds owned by the Social Security trust fund are stored. After viewing the bonds, Bush held a press conference and announced that "they're just sheets of paper."

Bush was absolutely right about the "sheets of paper" part of the story, but the "just" needs some further qualification. The value of these bonds depends on the taxing authority of the U.S. government. That is still the most valuable guarantee in the world.

Read more »

Gershom Gorenberg, of the American Prospect, takes on the developing conventional wisdom to pursue Israeli-Syrian peace before moving to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

I'm with Gorenberg. An Israeli-Syrian agreement would be a good thing. But it would not resolve the bleeding heart that is at the core of the Middle East conflict and America's problems in the Muslim world: the Palestinian issue.

Read more »

When considering what to do about abuses of the past seven years, it is worthwhile taking stock of how far we've come. When President-elect Obama takes office, the worst abuses of the Bush administration will be at an end: no more torture, cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment or rendition to other countries for mistreatment. Obama has promised to abide by the laws passed by Congress and I fully expect that when he disagrees with an interpretation of those laws, he will inform the Congress and the American people of his views. There will be no more warrantless wiretapping in violation of congressional statutes.

At the same time, as a democracy it is essential that we know our history, hold officials accountable -- at least through public condemnation-- and provide some redress for individual wrongs.

Read more »

Former Office of Legal Counsel head Jack Goldsmith declined to be interviewed when I called him a little while back for this story, but I'm glad to see he's weighed in on the subject anyway. This is as good a time as any to tackle head-on (as Scott has done here ) one of the most troublesome aspects of the Bush legacy.

To my mind, arguably the most pernicious thing that the Bush administration (and Dick Cheney and David Addington in particular) did was systematically exploit what were once useful gray areas in the law and institutions of government, a tactic that would inevitably force Bush's successor--regardless of who it was--to make decisions that have no possible good outcome. Guantanamo is the best example of this, but the OLC is a close second. OLC opinions (which, for those not deeply in the weeds on these issues, basically tell the president whether what he/she wants to do is legal or not) have indeed functioned as a "golden shield" in the way that Mukasey and Goldsmith describe, and in a better world this wouldn't be a bad thing--it's good for the White House to regularly assess the constitutionality of its actions. But this de facto authority is based on the assumption that the OLC is itself acting in good faith (as it did under previous presidents), rather than attempting to adjust the law to fit the president's intentions (as OLC counsel John Yoo and others did under Bush).

Read more »

If the reports that Robert Gates will be kept on as Defense Secretary for the first year of the Obama administration are true, it raises all kinds of questions -- on nuclear weapons policy, on Iraq, on military spending, on the balance between military and civilian tools of foreign assistance, and on policy towards Iran.

Gates is no Donald Rumsfeld, but nor is he an inspired choice. If Obama felt the need to appoint a Republican to his national security team, I would have much preferred Chuck Hagel at the State Department, with someone like Sam Nunn at Defense (assuming either or both of them would have been open to serving in these positions). But, we are where we are. What might the Gates appointment mean for the evolution of U.S. defense policy during Obama's crucial first year?

Read more »

Yesterday brought some remarkable developments on the accountability front. The Wall Street Journal, relying on Bush Administration sources, tells us that President Bush is not likely to extend pre-emptive pardons to those who were involved in his torture program and related extralegal misadventures. The White House is relying on the view that Attorney General Mukasey has been peddling aggressively in the last weeks (most recently at a talk he delivered at Columbia Law School) to the effect that OLC memoranda provide a "golden shield" against prosecution. Mukasey quotes that term from Jack Goldsmith's Terror Presidency, in which the Harvard professor and former Bush Administration lawyer discusses the reason why the OLC memos were so important to the Bushies.

Of course, I would be delighted to see Bush forego his shot at pardoning those involved in the torture program. But the legal analysis they're resting this on is just as shoddy as their legal analysis of the torture issue--and of course the dean of Yale Law School in Congressional testimony described the main OLC torture memo (upon which they're relying, among others) as "the most clearly legally erroneous opinion I have ever read." The memo was also denounced in an extraordinary resolution adopted by the American Bar Association as "legally incompetent." But this is what the White House is resting its analysis on.

Read more »

Charles Homans begins his article with a discussion about the excessive secrecy of the Bush administration. He is spot on. I call it the "Jack Nicholson style" of government. You remember it, from the movie A Few Good Men, when Nicholson, as Marine Colonel Nathan Jessup, pressed in court by the Tom Cruise-playing JAG officer about his role in ordering the "hazing" of a young Marine--leading to his death-- and then covering it up, yells at Cruise: "You can't handle the truth" He goes on to explain, "You don't want the truth because deep down in places you don't talk about at parties you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall."

It's my sense that the senior folks in the current administration believed that only they really understood what needed to be done after the attacks of 9/11. They did not think that others, whether in their own administration, in Congress, or in the American public, could handle "the truth" as they saw it. It was principally this fear-- that the Congress and the public would not agree with their tactics, rather than a concern about protecting classified information, that led to the excessive secrecy that permeated this Administration and proved to be so damaging.

Read more »

Two months after Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson expended practically every last penny of the Bush administration's political capital to pass the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) and the Treasury Department itself has spent a quarter of a trillion taxpayer dollars on TARP transactions, the entire undertaking seems to have had little to no affect on the macro-economy... and has raised more questions than it has resolved.

The banking sector is buffeted weekly by reports of some venerable financial institution brought to its knees, its market capitalization all but evaporated. Hundred of billions of TARP dollars have been spent on re-capitalization, with no sustained improvement in the credit markets. Implementation of the TARP oversight process has been delayed to the point where statutory reporting deadlines are being missed. The legally-mandated public accounting of TARP transactions conflicts with private and nonprofit accounts and redactions in contract disclosures are far from a model of transparency. For better or worse, not a cent has been spent on the purchase of a troubled asset of a single bank.

Read more »

As someone who lived through the aftermath of Watergate and the pain and recrimination that President Ford's decision to pardon Nixon inflicted on the country, I can only point out that many far wiser than me agreed that our nation could heal only by moving forward and abandoning any desire for retribution. So here too I leave it to others to debate the wisdom of extracting retribution from this administration and its many excesses and abuses of power, be it in the form of a trial or review by a bipartisan commission. But whether we cast our gaze backward on the abuses of the past or forward on how to prevent their reccurrence, one thing is clear: we need to have access to the historical records of the Bush presidency. They hold the key to both our past and future.

Read more »

Only in America.

Steve Rosen, the AIPAC official who was dismissed by the organization after being indicted for espionage, is leading the charge against the appointment of General James L. Jones as President Obama's National Security Adviser. Rosen says that Jones is too strenuous in opposition to the occupation of the West Bank (Jones has said that he would consider replacing IDF occupation forces with NATO troops as an interim step to separate Israelis and Palestinians). And Rosen has been calling reporters all over town to badmouth Jones.

Read more »

As I wrote before, an investigative commission is an imperfect solution to a daunting problem, and both Daniel and Rep. Edwards have pointed, quite rightly, to some of its most glaring imperfections.

It is true that the legacy of the Bush years is as much a saga of congressional abdication as it is of executive overreaching, and that oversight is Congress's constitutional duty. But I think a few distinctions need to be made here. One is that investigations have not been the exclusive province of the legislative branch in the past. Rep. Edwards points to Truman's investigations of the War Department and the Watergate hearings, but the Warren and Rockefeller Commissions were both executive branch affairs, and the 9/11 Commission was a hybrid executive/legislative project. Congress itself created several
effective non-legislative oversight tools in the years after Watergate, including the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and the inspector general system. So while convening a commission may not help restore Congress's standing, I'm not convinced that it does it any further damage, either.

Read more »

My former partner Michael Mukasey was giving a speech at a Federalist Society gathering on November 20. He collapsed towards the end of a remarkable speech, in which he offered extended praise for the Federalist Society and the role it had played in mobilizing the conservative legal revolution that will be the legacy of the Bush Administration. He turned in particular to defend the work of the many conservative legal ideologues in the Justice Department for their work in connection with the war on terror. The press coverage focused on his collapse--and I am encouraged to see that he staged a full and speedy recovery from what hopefully was no more than fatigue from a long work day--and ignored the substance of his speech. But here is a key portion in which he assailed 56 members of Congress for demanding a special prosecutor to investigate the Bush Administration's decision to introduce torture techniques including waterboarding, long-time standing, hypothermia and the use of psychotropic drugs on detainees in the war on terror. Here is Mukasey's response:

Members who signed this letter offered no evidence that these government officials acted based on any motive other than a good-faith desire to protect the citizens of our Nation from a future terrorist attack. Nor did they provide any evidence or indication that these government officials sought to authorize any policy that violated our laws. Quite the contrary: as has become well-known, before conducting interrogations, the CIA officials sought the advice of the Department of Justice, and I am aware of no evidence that these DOJ attorneys provided anything other than their best judgment of what the law required.

Read more »

The taxpayers are coughing up tens of billions of dollars because Citibank was run by incompetent people. As the Washington Post reminds us today, one of those people, Robert Rubin, was formerly a close associate of the two top government officials in charge of the bailout. He knew Treasury secretary Henry Paulson from his days at Goldman Sachs before he joined the Clinton administration. Rubin worked with New York Federal Reserve Board president Timothy Geithner when he was Treasury Secretary.

While it's nice to see old friends working together, this one really raises some concerns. There are tens of billions of taxpayer dollars being tossed around with minimal accountability. It is difficult to see why we should let Citigroup continue to be run by the crew that made it a ward of the state, especially when one member of this crew is such good friends with the people controlling the money.

Read more »

Eddie Jordan is a classy, well-spoken, and ethical person, if his innumerable exposures to the media over the years are even remotely accurate in conveying his character.

He should not have been fired.

Ernie Grunfeld should not have paid more than $100 million for Gil Arenas, who doesn't play and who was seriously injured when he was signed. He should have let Arenas go elsewhere. He should have gotten a back-up for BH as soon as the seriousness of the wrist injury was revealed. He should have long ago gotten rid of Etan Thomas. He should have found a legitimate young point guard; we had Steve Blake and he let him go, only to retrieve Juan Dixon who can't play in the NBA.

Read more »

Lilly Rivlin, an Israeli journalist, filmmaker and peace activist spoke at the same conference I did this past weekend.

Rivlin was asked what she thought about Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State. The questioner was worried about Hillary's closeness to the neocons.

Rivlin responded that Clinton will be working for Obama and that it's his policies that will carry the day. But then she added how important she thinks it is that Clinton is a woman.

Read more »

Presidential overreaching, even at a scale as grand and outrageous as that practiced by the Bush Administration, leaves the country in a bit of a quandary. Many who deplore the lawbreaking and its consequences will believe, not without considerable justification, that the President and his enablers must be brought literally before the bench and held to account. The argument here is that if a President violates both the Constitution and relevant statutes and is not made to answer for those actions, the very failure to punish will serve as a precedent that will encourage successors in the presidential office to act similarly, the same argument made by many who would have preferred to pursue impeachment.

Others will argue, also with merit, that the nation's problems -- two wars, an economic meltdown, environmental crises, the high costs of health care and education -- require the government's full attention. As was seen with the disastrous attempt to remove Bill Clinton from the presidency, impeachment diverts the attention of the White House, the Congress, the press, and the public from the problems at hand. Mr. Bush, they will say, will soon be gone and one should not allow his misdeeds to continue to do harm. In short, the argument goes, it is time to move on.

Read more »

First, let me offer my thanks to Charles Homans for his engaging article and to TPM for this forum. It seems to me that the strongest argument for the practicality of an investigative commission in the place of criminal investigation and prosecution of members of the outgoing administration is the difficulty in gathering evidence and having witnesses testify. As Mr. Homans has explained very well, the resistance Congress encountered when it tried to subpoena high-level White House staffers bodes ill for any attempt to discover the full truth about the decisions behind the most abusive policies of this administration. Invoking 5th Amendment rights and evasive or non-responsive answers would be common at any trial or hearing relating to these scandals. That being said, it is not clear why witnesses would necessarily be more truthful in their statements to an investigative commission, though they might be much more forthcoming.

Read more »

In the spirit of the impending holiday, let me start off by saying many thanks to TPM for the opportunity to kick around the question of how to investigate and reckon with the full Bush legacy in the company of people who are much better-schooled in this area than I am. Scott Horton of Harper's--who, unlike me, actually knows something about the law--has a great piece on the subject out this month (Harper's hasn't put it online for non-subscribers, but if you have superhuman vision maybe you can read the tiny thumbnails here). Anne Weismann of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington is actually involved in some of the legal actions we'll be discussing here. Rep. Mickey Edwards, Kate Martin and Daniel Larison all come at these questions from usefully different angles, and it also goes without saying that TPM itself has been instrumental in advancing our awareness of the
administration's wrongdoing.

It's safe to say that most people who hang around this site are aware that George Bush and Dick Cheney will leave office with a staggering volume of unanswered questions in their wake. Answering them is of great importance for a lot of obvious and not-so-obvious reasons, the biggest of them being that we can't prevent these kinds of abuses from happening again if we don't know what exactly they were and how they happened. We know a lot already, but we don't know enough.

Read more »

This week at Cafe, Charles Homans is joining us for a special discussion, something we've been gnawing on at Cafe for a while now. The topic: what should be done in the last days of the Bush presidency and the beginning of Obama's term to address the malfeasance of the last 8 years. The conversation will be centered around Charles' upcoming article in the Washington Monthly: Last Secrets of the Bush Administration: How to find out what we still don't know.

It's easy to let this slide out of the public discourse right now. The economy, Obama's new team of appointees, etc, are crowding the table. As Charles writes:

"The thought of revisiting this history after living through it for eight years is exhausting, and both President Barack Obama and Congress will have every political reason to just move on. But we can't--it's too important."

Have you ever seen a President so completely disappear?

Discussing with Charles: Scott Horton, New York attorney specializing in human rights law and the law of armed conflict, and regular contributor to Harper's; Suzanne Spaulding, lawyer specializing in national security issues, including homeland security, intelligence, and terrorism; Daniel Larison, Ph.D student at the University of Chicago and host of the blog, Eunomia; Mickey Edwards, former congressman (R-OK), lecturer at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson school, and Vice President of the Aspen Institute; Anne Weismann, Chief Counsel at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington; and finally, Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies.

Charles' first post up shortly. Join us.

I can hardly think of anyone I'd rather have our new President talking to about foreign policy than Brent Scowcroft. Here is a shorthand way to understand Scowcroft's foreign policy views.

Take everything you hate about the neocons and think "exact opposite" and you have Scowcroft. He was against the Iraq war. Opposes confrontation with Iran. And wants to use every resource at our command to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and implement the two-state solution NOW.

And he has Obama's ear.

Read more »

Time's Mark Halperin has found his moral compass. According to Alexander Burns at Politico, he's decided that

"media bias was more intense in the 2008 election than in any other national campaign in recent history."

"It's the most disgusting failure of people in our business since the Iraq war," Halperin said at a panel of media analysts. "It was extreme bias, extreme pro-Obama coverage."

If the quote is accurate, Halperin overlooks the Swift Boat coverage of 2004 and the Bill Ayers-fest. According to Burns' piece, the sole example of bias that Halperin gives is the comparison between a "vicious" NYT slash-and-burn job on Cindy McCain compared to their puff piece on Michelle Obama.

Read more »

Yesterday's maladroit WP headline "Some in Arab World Wary of Clinton; One Issue: Whether Probable Secretary of State Would Be More Hawk Than Dove," mischaracterizes the Michael Abramowitz piece it adorns. It isn't till the 20th paragraph that a single Arab is quoted, and then it's one Palestinian characterizing other Arabs:

Amjad Atallah, who formerly served as a legal adviser for the Palestinian negotiating team in peace talks with the Israelis, said the prospective Clinton nomination is being watched warily in the Arab world, given her unstinting support for Israel in recent years and hawkish comments on Iran. Some worry that her selection is a possible indicator that Obama may not be as aggressive as Palestinians hope in pushing for a peace deal.

"Nobody has a negative opinion of Senator Clinton, except maybe that her opinions are closer to the neoconservatives than they might wish," Atallah said.

Read more »

A bit more than a decade ago, I received a briefing at Sandia National Weapons Laboratories on a few of their private-public partnerships, or CRADAs (Cooperative Research and Development Agreements). Intel had a CRADA with Sandia and Los Alamos Labs on developing extreme ultra-violet lithography. Many other top tier firms did too.

But the CRADA that interested me most was General Motors.

Read more »

I spoke at a conference in New York yesterday that was pretty amazing. It was called "Jews United Against the War" and was sponsored by Workmen's Circle, the Shalom Center and Jewish Currents.

Anyway, take a look at this terrific piece by Phil Weiss and especially about Liz Holtzman's role. For you youngsters, Liz Holtzman came within 80,000 votes of becoming New York's most progressive Senator ever. She lost due to a third party effort designed to draw enough votes from Holtzman so that a real progressive never made it to the Senate from New York. She was defeated by Al D'Amato (Likud-NY).

Read more »

I first saw Larry Summers do a seminar presentation for my graduate department. He looked like a Hassid, sporting a beard, dark suit and tie. When he turned around to write on the blackboard, we spied a single shirt tail hanging below his jacket, giving rise to a suppressed titter in the assembled. But nobody laughed at his presentation, nor when he corrected misconceptions volunteered by assorted senior professors. At the time he was about 30 years old. My other Larry story is about a speech he gave to the National Tax Association, an assemblage of tax lawyers, accountants, economists, and technocratic government types. He offered tribute to the group as only he can, noting that the first professional economics journal he ever followed was the National Tax Journal. He modestly reported that it was the only one he could understand, since he was still in high school.

Bob Reich provdes an upbeat roundup on the Obama economic team, but it's missing the main character, the aforementioned Larry.

Read more »

This unusually trenchant article by Israeli diplomatic reporter Amir Oren (in this morning's Haaretz) serves as a counterpart to M.J. Rosenberg's important post below. It explores the shape of the Obama administration's likely approach to the Arab-Israeli conflict, at least insofar as we can project from the appointment of Gen. James Jones as national security advisor. There is nothing new to this approach; the shape of a deal has been clear for years, which Ehud Olmert all but admitted in recent interviews. The "parameters" which first set out the deal bear the name of the future Secretary of State.

The real question is how to press the deal on two peoples, each so divided that there are really (at least) four peoples--about which more in future posts from Jerusalem. By the way, an elaborated version of last week's post on the auto industry can be read in today's Washington Post's Outlook section.