A recent post over at The Economist's Democracy in America blog says the Syria showdown at the UN between the US, Russia, and China demonstrates a crucial yet underappreciated success of Obama foreign policy:

Ten years back, America often found itself isolated, struggling to pull together "coalitions of the willing" packed with small client states. Lately, we have been finding ourselves in the majority, along with the democratic world, while Russia and China front a dwindling coalition of the unwilling.

Yes, President Obama has shown a remarkable ability to forge a united international front on issue after issue. The quantum increase in support for US positions and initiatives is a much bigger deal than media assessments have acknowledged. As other nations have become more welcoming toward the United States' global role, the president can make a strong claim to have rehabilitated American leadership.

Actually if I'd fault the Economist writer for anything, it's that s/he lacks the courage of her own optimism.

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The human body is an amazing creation. It's not only the most complex system known to mankind, but it embodies within it signals that tell its owner that something has gone wrong. A similar signaling system exists in political bodies. Those tasked with reading the signals--be they individuals, physicians or politicians--can choose to consciously ignore the warning signs. The Middle East peace process between Palestinians and Israelis has been emitting SOS signals for decades, but only recently are those signals being received and analyzed for what they are transmitting--a clear and irreversible message that the entire paradigm of "two states for two peoples" has collapsed.

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Depending on how you look at it, tensions with Iran are mounting to: an accidental war, an intentional war, a recession-causing oil price spike, a dizzying sequence of moves / countermoves / signals, an escalating cycle of assassinations, renewed negotiations, or a combination thereof. At any rate, they're mounting.

Even before all the drama of last week, looming sanctions against the Iranian central bank sparked a debate on whether such harsh economic measures are the functional equivalent of seeking regime change. I argue that the international pressure forged by the Obama administration has been consistent in its aim: opening Iran's nuclear program to the kind of scrutiny that will prove its civilian character. The administration has had to ratchet up the pressure because of Iranian leaders' intransigence. As I said in my post last Monday, it's vital to distinguish this policy-change goal from regime-change because "the only way Iranian leaders would cooperate in proving Iran's non-weapon status is if that would make them less, rather than more, vulnerable."

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These days we're hearing two sets of concerns about the US and international pressure on Iran over its nuclear program. From one direction, GOP presidential candidates and other ultra-hawks argue for an escalated conflict with Iran. According to them, President Obama isn't doing enough or is actually coddling Tehran. Not that the candidates really know much about the Administration's Iran policy, but that's par for the course and part and parcel of an increasingly bizarro Republican foreign policy aproach.

For some of Obama's critics, their faith in military action gives them utter confidence that attacking Iran would squelch its nuclear ambitions without the kind of backlash we might regret. (Hmm, where have we heard that before?)

Yet another set of commentators, who are less sanguine about a war with Iran, warn that tightening the screws of economic sanctions -- currently being prepared -- already puts things on a dangerous course. Prominent voices in this camp are Trita Parsi and Suzanne Maloney, two of the foreign policy community's top experts on the region and certainly warranting close attention. Indeed, the questions they raise are central: has the Obama administration put higher priority on the sanctions than on the nuclear program itself, and in the process complicated (if not doomed) the effort to reach a peaceful solution?

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Someone please explain for me this idea that President Obama "owns" the situtation in Iraq. As I work to catch up on some of the Iraq pull-out commentary from over the holidays, I won't try to match the depth of Steve Clemons' counterpoint to Fred and Kimberly Kagan's recent Weekly Standard piece. Instead, I'll direct some of the views I share with Steve toward engaging Peter Feaver over at Shadow Government and ploughing the ground Feaver stakes out: setting fair terms to judge the president's Iraq policy. His questoin is "Can Obama take credit for ending the Iraq War without taking blame for what happens next?" To which my answer is: "why the hell not?"

Feaver cries foul on the attempt he sees by Obama supporters to give him full credit for anything positive in Iraq and saddle President Bush with everything negative. Well, what is the Obama Administration claiming to have done? President Obama claims credit for extricating American forces from nearly nine years of military involvement there. By the way, can I pause for a moment to say how absurd it is to talk about a hasty exit after nine years?!?

But returning to Feaver's argument, he'd have a stronger point about taking responsibility for the bad along with the good if Obama was claiming credit having locked in a stable future for Iraq. Except that's not the claim. Like President Bush before him, the president has tried to use the US military presence to the best stabilizing effect for Iraqis and express gratitude and pride in the efforts of the those who served that mission. But how did all of this come about, and by what notion of fairness and responsibility do we treat the original act of invasion as water under the bridge?

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It's the end of the year and time to turn the page after a bit of reflecting. What better way to reflect than to contrast image and reality, and even more so when the topic is Palestine's economy? For starters, I ask, Do we have an economy, real or imagined? For a long time, many would just sweep this question under the rug of the Israeli military occupation and say No. How could we when every aspect of our livelihood is ultimately micromanaged by the Israeli government?

But such a knee-jerk answer did not make sense after the Oslo Agreement and the advent of the Palestinian Authority. From that point on, the economic reality under occupation was spiced up with heavy doses of self-made artificial images. The starting image, if my memory serves me well, was that we would "build a Singapore." May God rest that imager's soul. I hope the real Singapore never asks Palestinians to compensate them for the damage done to its good name.

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Embedded within some of the critiques of the mounting Iran War fever are clues to the larger problems of the Republicans' foreign policy approach. A new Foreign Affairs "Time to Attack Iran" article by Matthew Kroenig has drawn responses from fellow Democracy Arsenal blogger Michael Cohen as well as ForeignPolicy.com bloggers Stephen Walt and Dan Drezner. All of them highlight the right wing tendency to inflate threats and discount potential blowback, but it's also important to see this as part of a larger pattern of playing fast and loose with reality.

In a weird way, I'm kind of envious of the critics who offer themselves as a replacement for the Obama administration. Foreign policy is so much easier the way they do it. True to Mencken's classic put-down, they have a clear and simple answer for every complex problem. I like how Michael Cohen encapsulated it in a recent ForeignPolicy.com piece on the candidate debates:

To listen to the GOP candidates on Iran is to think that an American president can use a little military force here, drop a few sanctions there, and voilà, the Iranian nuclear program will be stopped dead in its tracks.

Right, magical thinking.

Plus, they get to feel all Winston Churchill-ey -- which may indeed be a main point. As Churchill's presumptive heirs, they pride themselves on unique insight into the true nature of the threats we face (i.e. worse-than-Democrats-recognize) and the necessary response (i.e. tougher-than-Democrats-would-do). Republicans have become so entranced by this political self-image that they are staking their entire foreign policy on moral clarity, threat-inflation, defiance toward the rest of the world, and toughness for its own sake.

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It's the holiday season, a serviceable pretext time for good clean nonsense. Last year I offered my misheard lyrics video for the epic Clash song "Safe European Home" (fairly suitable for work, but funny mainly for Clash fans). Today's frivolous offering is more politically salient: a Mad Libs version of the GOP foreign policy argument. I would cross-post it here in the Cafe, but it's a quite a job laying it out so that everything lines up, so just read it over at Democracy Arsenal. A merry, happy, joyful, blessed to you and yours.

Some Palestinians refuse to just sit still and accept their fate as a permanently, militarily occupied people. One would think by now that Palestinians would have received the message loud and clear - the world couldn't care less about their fate. But no, these Palestinians just refuse to sit still. They continue to defy their reality and can be seen across the Holy Land - jumping, climbing, swinging, falling, tripping, singing, twirling, juggling, cycling, tight roping, and the like. Their nerve! To think they can attempt to live a normal life when the powers that be are spending billions, literally, to cause a collapse of Palestinian society.

And who is it exactly I speak of? Palestinian clowns. No, I'm not taking a swing at the political leadership, at least not here. I'm talking about the real thing: circus clowns, like in clowns that make you laugh and make you forget that the boot of occupation is pressing on your neck.

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Reading assessments of the recent Durban conference by leading climate wonks, many of them argue that the issue of a binding treaty -- to eventually take the place of the Kyoto Protocol -- must be viewed against a broader backdrop. In other words, the push to eventually enact global obligations for emission cuts is a fraught endeavor, and other tracks are just as important.

Which raises interesting general questions about treaties as a focus of multilateral effort and public hopes. Are binding treaties always good litmus tests of seriousness in addressing international problems? Are there cases in which the quest to codify and ratify is Quixotic, when the best is truly enemy of the good?

Not that I have anything against treaties; some of my best advocacy has been around treaties. For some issues they're essential -- last year's New START agreement on strategic nuclear arms, for one. It's important, however, to remember that international accords are not ends unto themselves, but instead are means to address real-world problems.

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The reports of the death of the Neo-Conservative Movement have been greatly exaggerated. Dick Cheney has become a cheerleader for Newt Gingrich whose sole intention seems to be to continue The Long War ad infinitum. On a day when we finally ended the most disastrous strategy of the Neo-Cons, the Iraq War, Gingrich is doubling down on the next war--In Iran.

He painted a chain of events in which an Israeli prime minister asked an American president for help with a conventional military invasion of Iran so that Israel would not have to use its nuclear arsenal to defend itself. Mr. Gingrich implied that he would go along. "What I won't do is allow Israel to be threatened with another Holocaust," he said. "This is a not-very-far-down-the-road decision."

A joint US-Israeli invasion of Iran! Unfuckingbelievable. These people are counting on the collective amnesia of Americans.

The juxtaposition of the Gingrich-Cheney Plan for our future with the New York Times discovery of a cache of Top Secret documents about the Haditha Massacre in Iraq couldn't have been more poignant .

The stress of combat left some soldiers paralyzed, the testimony shows. Troops, traumatized by the rising violence and feeling constantly under siege, grew increasingly twitchy, killing more and more civilians in accidental encounters. Others became so desensitized and inured to the killing that they fired on Iraqi civilians deliberately while their fellow soldiers snapped pictures, and were court-martialed. The bodies piled up at a time when the war had gone horribly wrong.

As I have said before, this election needs to be fought on two issues: income inequality and cutting the bloated Pentagon and our imperial overreach. Whether President Obama and the Democrats have the guts to fight on those issues will be a test, but strangely enough they might find support among the Ron Paul wing of the Republican party in that fight.

My friend is Walid Abu Rass. He is the Finance and Administration Manager for the Health Work Committees (HWC, at www.hwc-pal.org), one of the largest community health service providers in the occupied Palestinian territory. HWC serves over 500,000 patients/beneficiaries per year! More on HWC in a second.

I had not seen Walid for a while. We are both knee deep in Palestine's daily rat race. About two months ago, Walid and his HWC colleagues called for a meeting of their circle of friends. They sought assistance. HWC was going through some financial hard times, especially with the financial crisis in Europe, where many of their donors are based.

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I'm ready to wager that when the campaign of 2012 is all over, President Obama's speech yesterday in Osawatomie, Kansas will be seen as the turning point that led to his victory in November 2012. Readers of this blog know that I have long cited Teddy Roosevelt's Progressive Movement (outlined in his own speech at Osawatomie 101 years ago) as one of the high water marks in American politics. The great historian Richard Hofstadter noted that the progressive reform movement "was the effort to restore a type of economic individualism and political democracy that was widely believed to have existed earlier in America and to have been destroyed by the great corporation and the corrupt political machine." That of course is the effort that we must undertake today.

My first request is that you read the whole speech. It is one of the finest examples of progressive political oratory in my lifetime. It is part history lesson and part economics seminar. It is throughout, bracingly beautiful.

Now, just as there was in Teddy Roosevelt's time, there's been a certain crowd in Washington for the last few decades who respond to this economic challenge with the same old tune. "The market will take care of everything," they tell us. If only we cut more regulations and cut more taxes - especially for the wealthy - our economy will grow stronger. Sure, there will be winners and losers. But if the winners do really well, jobs and prosperity will eventually trickle down to everyone else. And even if prosperity doesn't trickle down, they argue, that's the price of liberty.

It's a simple theory - one that speaks to our rugged individualism and healthy skepticism of too much government. It fits well on a bumper sticker. Here's the problem: It doesn't work. It's never worked. It didn't work when it was tried in the decade before the Great Depression. It's not what led to the incredible post-war boom of the 50s and 60s. And it didn't work when we tried it during the last decade.

Remember that in those years, in 2001 and 2003, Congress passed two of the most expensive tax cuts for the wealthy in history, and what did they get us? The slowest job growth in half a century. Massive deficits that have made it much harder to pay for the investments that built this country and provided the basic security that helped millions of Americans reach and stay in the middle class - things like education and infrastructure; science and technology; Medicare and Social Security.

Yesterday on my Facebook page, one of our regular correspondents, Alex Bowles wrote, "I'm beginning the think the entire Fox/GOP nexus comes down to a single objective: not pricing externalities." This fundamental notion of the Right is ironically, "the socialization of unwanted costs." I think this is a profound insight that will go to the heart of the battle for American Democracy in the next 11 months. The core idea of this "free market" religion is that every individual and firm should try to "maximize their welfare", leaving it to the rest of us to clean up their mess. Anyone watching last Sunday's 60 Minutes, would see this principle in action where Mortgage bankers at Countrywide and Citibank took huge bonuses, while committing fraud and sticking taxpayers with the bill. Anyone observing the Coal industry lobbying , sees this principle in action--stop regulation, so the Taxpayer has to pay for the cost of their pollution.

As I have pointed out in my new book, Outlaw Blues, these battles between the oligarchy and the people have been fought since Jefferson battled Hamilton for the soul of America. We may never reach a final resolution until the Supreme Court stops proclaiming that "Money=Speech", but if Obama's speech yesterday is the frame on which is willing to battle for the next 11 months, it is a fight worth engaging in.

Democracy Arsenal and National Security Network head into tonight's CNN/Heritage/AEI candidate forum with an awesome array of analysis. A long way of saying where you can find great stuff as a viewer's guide for tonight. For my part, I'd only add a particular angle -- my diagnostic manual for the recent outbreak of foreign policy dysphasia, published over at care2. In other words, Republican foreign policy pronouncements have been so bad for so long that we can catalog them by type. I identified five: cribbing from the Colbert Report, promises of omnipotence (I will stop Iran's nukes), falling into the talking point - serious policy gap, reflexive Obama condemnation, and conscientious ignorance. But as they say, read the whole thing.

Barack Obama learned a political trick from Muhammad Ali called Rope a Dope. For you youngsters, this refers to the epic Rumble in the Jungle Heavyweight fight against George Foreman in 1974. Here is the Wikipedia explanation.

The rope-a-dope is performed by a boxer assuming a protected stance, in Ali's classic pose, lying against the ropes, and allowing his opponent to hit him, toward the end that the opponent will tire and make mistakes which the boxer can exploit in a counter-attack. By leaning against the ropes, much of the punch's force is absorbed by the ropes' elasticity rather than the boxer's body.

In competitive situations other than boxing, rope-a-dope is used to describe strategies in which one party purposely puts itself in what appears to be a losing position, attempting thereby to become the eventual victor.

Last summer during the debt ceiling hostage crisis, Obama appeared to be the loser, but yesterday Republicans woke up to the reality that they lost Big Time--that we were going to get $1.2 trillion in deficit reductions, with 50% of the cuts coming from the military and none of the cuts from Social Security and Medicare. The Congressional water carriers for the Military Industrial Complex are in a panic.

Republican lawmakers moved quickly Monday to protect the Pentagon from automatic budget cuts that will be triggered by the supercommittee's failure, with the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee saying he'll soon introduce legislation to repeal them.

President Obama immediately threatened to veto any attempt to undo the spending cuts. That means that Republicans would have to get a 2/3 rds majority to undo the first meaningful cutback in the Military budget in 60 years. In addition, if Obama also threatens to veto any attempt to restore the Bush Tax cuts in 2012 (they expire automatically on January 1, 2013), progressives will have totally changed the inequality dynamic, without having to pass a single piece of legislation.

So why aren't progressives celebrating this morning? Got me. As long time readers know, it has been my contention that the key to revival of our democracy and our economy lies in radically reordering where we spend our collective resources. That more than 60% of our discretionary budget flows to the Military Industrial Complex is just the most egregious example of Crony Capitalism. If you had suggested to me last spring that a Republican House would pass a bill cutting $600 billion from the Pentagon budget over ten years, I would have called you crazy. But that is just what happened.

So there is only one election that matters a year from now. And that is that President Obama will be reelected and able to keep his veto threat. There is no possible 2012 electoral realignment of the Senate and House that would give the Republicans a 2/3 rds majority.

This is an amazing victory and all we have to do to hold on to it is reelect the President.

If nothing else, devoting an entire GOP campaign forum to national security and foreign policy -- the CBS News / National Journal organizers called it the "Commander in Chief Debate" -- helps accentuate the preparation and seriousness the candidates have devoted to international affairs. Or the lack thereof, since some candidates appeared utterly unserious and unprepared.

First, a quick best and worst. It was no contest for best: Jon Huntsman. Gov. Huntsman's quotient of substance to platitudes / cheap applause lines was way above everyone else. Of course, foreign policy seriousness is a pillar of his candidacy (bless him). And of course his poll numbers have been stuck in the basement. If there are any centrist Republicans among our readers, this man is trying to rescue you from the fire-breathers. (BTW, another very interesting moment was Rick Santorum's answers on Pakistan, where he seemed to employ the same strategy as Huntsman.) Worst was also an easy call: Herman Cain. The man said almost nothing of substance on Saturday -- and "almost" might be too generous. He keeps reaching for the same line about how presidents have plenty of advisers and don't really have to know anything. "Herman Cain, the candidate who will make up for his ignorance by seeking a lot of advice." Don't know if that's going to fly with the electorate, but we'll see. At one point, Cain tossed in the word strategically a few times because, you know, that sounds commander-in-chiefish.

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I always love it when David Brooks and Paul Krugman tussle on the pages of the New York Times. On Monday, Brooks wrote a column called The Wrong Inequality, arguing that the Occupy Movement was wrong to target the 1% and that the real inequality problem was between the people who didn't have a college degree and those who did. This is what I call the feeble attempt on the right to change the subject.

So this morning Krugman weighs in with Oligarchy, American Style and without ever mentioning Brooks by name, performs an epic smackdown.

Pundits try to put a more benign face on the phenomenon, claiming that it's not really the wealthy few versus the rest, it's the educated versus the less educated.

So what you need to know is that all of these claims are basically attempts to obscure the stark reality: We have a society in which money is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few people, and in which that concentration of income and wealth threatens to make us a democracy in name only.

He then goes on to point out that the biggest gains are really going to the top .01%, whose incomes have risen more than 400% since Ronald Reagan first started cutting taxes for the wealthy. As I point out in my new book, Outlaw Blues; Adventures in the Counter-culture Wars , the rationale for Republican supply side economics from 1980 on has been that cutting taxes on the wealthy encourages investment in the productive industries which in turn fuels employment for all, leading to higher consumption of products in a virtuous circle. But that obviously is not working out to be true and so the Republicans now contend that the investment of all this surplus wealth from both corporate and billionaire balance sheets is not happening because they are "uncertain about the future" under the Obama administration.

This is nonsense. What has happened in the last 30 years is very clear. Because all of the income gains have gone to a very small number of people, the purchasing power of the average household has fallen dramatically. For a while (1989-2006) this was masked by the explosion of consumer credit as people used their home equity like an ATM to keep up with the aspirational lifestyles of the rich and famous. As for the rich and famous, they were not investing in new productive enterprises, they were speculating in the casino we call Wall Street. Investment bankers worked long hours to invent new instruments of speculation as the explosion of derivatives masked the sad truth that the traditional role of finance as the engine of new enterprise faded into the background noise on the trading floor.

As for the one real area of Innovation in our society, the Internet Industries, it has become increasingly obvious that the capital needs of these businesses are relatively low compared to the last boom of industrialization that fueled the post war growth of steel, autos, chemicals and oil. Why else would Microsoft, Apple, Google and IBM each have over $50 Billion in cash sitting in the bank?

We are not going to get out of this stagnation until the gains of our economy are spread a little bit more evenly. The Koch Brothers and their mouthpiece Herman Cain (with Rick Perry in the Green Room) are trying to cut their taxes even further by floating flat tax proposals. I think an election fought on the lines of "Whose side are you on?"--forcing the Republicans to defend their "Oligarchy, America Style"--will be good for our fading democracy.

Israel and the United States have perfected, almost to a science, the management of international players who dare to intervene in trying to advance peace in the Middle East between Palestinians and Israelis. The most recent political configuration to serve this purpose is the "Quartet on the Middle East", better known as just "the Quartet", a self- appointed foursome of nations and international and supranational entities involved in mediating the peace process in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. 

The Quartet is comprised of the United Nations, United States, European Union and Russia. The group was established in Madrid in 2002. Given that the United States dominates the Quartet, one does not need to be a political scientist to conclude that the entire setup merely serves as a facade for continued American unwillingness to uphold its legal obligations, under international law, to hold its strategic ally, Israel, accountable for maintaining an unlawful four-decade military occupation of Palestinians.

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It's not just the young in the Occupy Movement who fear for their futures. Many older people, who are marching with them, dread retirement, even if they hate their jobs. They fear social isolation, the loss of friends they enjoyed at work and the freedom of too much unstructured time. The good news is that women are already preparing for what is often called the "third chapter" of their lives. What's sad is that men of the same age, for a variety of reasons, are largely unprepared and less likely to participate in activities that offer stimulation and friendship.

So what is the first generation of women, who spent much of their lives working outside the home, doing that somehow eludes men?

They are re-creating opportunities to explore their lives and finding ways to resurrect the world of women's groups that gave them the confidence to reinvent their lives decades ago.

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In my new book, Outlaw Blues; Adventures in the Counter-culture Wars, I talk about the role of the great protest song in the early days of the Civil Rights Movement. Songs like If I had a Hammer, Blowin in the Wind, We Shall Overcome were the basic tool of non-violent protest sit-ins. If you were going to get arrested, it was easier if everyone was singing the same anthem. I thought about that the other day in New York when I visited Occupy Wall Street. The main music of the encampment was some drum circles. That's like a performance--full of ego. It's the opposite of singing an anthem.

I think we need some new anthems, but it also raises a larger question. The great non-violent protest movements of the past have had at their core a leader whose core vision was of love, not anger. As Michael Shellenberger pointed out years ago, King's most famous speech was "I have a dream" not "I have a nightmare". The core of OWS is the concept "We are the 99%". It is brilliant in its simplicity to distill the notion that the whole system is rigged to advantage the 1%, but without a dream---a vision of how we get out of this Interregnum---the movement will never advance beyond drum circles, witty posters and identity politics.

The world seems to be in deep, collective amnesia. We have been here before--at a point where half-baked initiatives and distorted negotiations based on the power imbalance on the ground and non-compliant with international law were touted as "the right formula" and "the way forward". It's wake-up time.

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"We're drifting, and the laughs are few . . . "

Hello again. It's been a while. Until two weeks ago, we were faced with the dubious satisfaction of reelecting a center-right president who chooses to defend the welfare of Wall Street rather than that of the working class. The satisfaction reduces to preventing the ascension of certifiable lunatics to high office. Now something new is happening, about which more tomorrow.

Some are enthused over the emergence of the new, combative Barack Obama, talkin' bout taxing them rich. I'm so old I remember 2008, when this Obama delivered a symphony of progressive dog whistles. We know what happened next.

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