Two of my all time favorite experts, William Pfaff and Juan Cole, have both written about Barack Obama's strategy for the war in Afghanistan. A strategy which might be defined as "out of the frying pan (Iraq) and into the fire (Afghanistan). Briefly, to take troops from Iraq and take them to Afghanistan to "fight Al Qaeda".

Pfaff and Cole both coincide in their advice: Bad idea, don't do it.

Please read the quotes below with great care.

Age before beauty, first at bat, William Pfaff:

Barack Obama has announced his intention to commit himself to another disaster in the making. As president, he would dispatch reinforcements “to fight Al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan.” During the campaign has repeatedly attacked George Bush for going to war against the wrong enemy, Iraq, in the guise of fighting Al Qaeda. Now he will reinforce the fight against the Taliban, once again in the guise of fighting Al Qaeda. The Taliban are not Al Qaeda, any more than the Iraqis were. There is a civil war going on in Afghanistan. There may soon be a civil war in northern Pakistan. The Taliban are involved in both, and the United States has every interest in staying out of both.(...) At one point in their tangled history they afforded hospitality to their fellow-traditionalist Muslim, the Saudi Arabian Osama ben-Ladin. That was their big mistake. The Bush administration made the bigger mistake of becoming entangled with them, for which the United States will eventually be sorry. Barack Obama should think again about what he proposes to do.

Now for Juan Cole:

If the Afghanistan gambit is sincere, I don't think it is good geostrategy. Afghanistan is far more unwinnable even than Iraq. If playing it up is politics, then it is dangerous politics. Presidents can become captive of their own record and end up having to commit to things because they made strong representations about them to the public.(...) We who admire him don't want Afghanistan to become an albatross around the neck of a President Obama. I am old enough to remember one of the things that nearly killed the Democratic Party as a presidential party in the US, which was the way Lyndon Johnson let himself gradually get roped into ramping up the US troop presence in Vietnam from a small force to 500,000, and then still not win. Afghan tribes are fractious. They feud. Their territory is vast and rugged, and they know it like the back of their hands. Afghans are Jeffersonians in the sense that they want a light touch from the central government, and heavy handedness drives them into rebellion. Stand up Karzai's army and air force and give him some billions to bribe the tribal chiefs, and let him apply carrot and stick himself. We need to get out of there. "Al-Qaeda" was always Bin Laden's hype. He wanted to get us on the ground there so that the Mujahideen could bleed us the way they did the Soviets. It is a trap.

Both Cole and Pfaff coincide that Osama bin Laden is not really the issue. I myself believe that Tora Bora was the unique chance to get him and the US blew it. After that the USA has "taken the bait" and fallen into Bin Laden's trap and should extract itself forthwith.

In the middle of the above extract Juan makes, for me, the most important point:

We who admire him don't want Afghanistan to become an albatross around the neck of a President Obama. I am old enough to remember one of the things that nearly killed the Democratic Party as a presidential party in the US, which was the way Lyndon Johnson let himself gradually get roped into ramping up the US troop presence in Vietnam from a small force to 500,000, and then still not win.

Why is this so important?

Two important premises that I argue from after reading Pfaff and Cole:

(1) If Barack Obama is sworn in a President of the United States, his first objective, as it is the objective of every young man who has ever been elected president, will be to get reelected president. 2012 will loom before him like a chimera and will color his every thought, his every word and his every action.

(2) Democrats with no military experience are obsessed with not being viewed as wimps (Republicans like Bush and Cheney are too, but the Republicans don't attack them). President Obama, not the world's most mannish boy to begin with, will want to prove beyond a doubt to everyone here and abroad that he has big, big, big, cojones.

That need to prove his masculinity was what broke Lyndon Baines Johnson, perhaps the only potentially great president after Roosevelt and cost a million dead Vietnamese and 50,000 dead Americans.

Lyndon Baines Johnson was one of the smartest, big hearted, can do, practical and experienced men to ever sit in the White House. Barack Obama is not worthy to tie LBJ's sandal, or at least nothing in his brief public life would give him any right to presume so. Therefore I think Obama would be much more vulnerable than Johnson to prove he had the "right stuff". That is the formula for disaster, because, don't kid yourself, to "win the war" would finally lead, escalation by escalation into an invasion and dismemberment of Pakistan and that is the abyss, the bottomless pit of America's self destruction if ever there was one.

Quite reasonably you could point out that McCain is also in favor of "winning".

Sure he is. The only thing he has going for him is that people may doubt his health, sanity and temper, but nobody, but nobody, anywhere, is ever going to doubt John McCain's cojones. Which means that if it becomes obvious to military experts that America has to pull out of Afghanistan or suffer the same fate there as the Soviets did, McCain will be able do it without anybody (especially the "Republican attack machine") calling him a wimp or doubting for one moment his patriotism. He has that credit, which would be vital in this situation.

As to Iraq: finally the US will have to content itself with the "legacy" of having removed Saddam Hussein and created a freely elected government in Baghdad. Drawing the line under that would allow Americans to still think that they are somehow "special" and save another few trillion dollars and God knows how many lives.

As Pfaff says,

Barack Obama calls the Iraq prime minister’s demand for an American troop withdrawal schedule “an enormous opportunity.” He is right, and it must be accepted. This is what the majority of the American public voted for, but didn’t get, from the midterm American election of 2006.

Instead the Bush government gave Americans the surge. The surge has resulted in Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s demand for a phased American withdrawal from Iraq. Bush expected the surge to produce victory, whatever that might mean, and the right to dictate the terms on which the United States would stay in Iraq, not leave.

Those terms were made known earlier this year: total American exemption from Iraqi law (meaning extra-territorial legal status), veto over Iraqi government decisions, control over Iraqi military and police operations, authority to arrest and imprison Iraqi citizens and foreigners, immunity for American contractors from Iraqi law, and control of Iraq’s airspace.

The surge did the opposite. It created the conditions for Maliki’s demand that the U.S. and its allies leave. General David Petraeus built cement walls in cities to separate Sunnis from Shi’ites. This meant reciprocal ethnic cleansing in sensitive areas, to suppress conflict.

Petraeus paid Sunni tribal groups to fight foreigners – the self-named “al Qaeda in Mesopotamia” – and to keep order in their areas. He encouraged the Maliki government to impose its authority on the radical militia controlled by the young Shi’ite leader, Moqtada al-Sadr.

This created the conditions in which rival power groups, as in Basra, provisionally settled the power issues at stake between them, which would have (and possibly will again) produce conflict when the occupation ends.

The surge segregated groups, imposed truces, and made provisional arrangements to buy peace between factions. It thus created conditions in which the Iraqis want the occupation to end.

Some in Washington don’t want this because the Pentagon has built bases throughout Iraq it certainly does not want to give up, and the State Department has built in the Green Zone the world’s biggest American embassy, complete with tennis courts, swimming pools, leaking roofs and flooding toilets, and a fast-food shopping mall complete with blast shelters, just for Americans, and is anxious to move in and run Iraq. Is all this to be sacrificed to an unwelcome Iraqi sovereignty?

 No one knows; but it begins to look that way, as according to the latest reports, American and Iraqi officials have now abandoned negotiations, leaving it to a new American president to take up the matter.

Barack Obama, if elected, would do well to immediately accept the Maliki demand, and leave no U.S. forces behind that could pull Americans back into Iraq. Give the Iraq government what it wants, and leave the disaster of the past six years totally on the account of George W. Bush and Richard Cheney

Who knows, if the US did that, maybe someday, when today's dead have turned to dust, some Iraqis might even feel grateful.

But to use that retreat to up the ante in Afghanistan, thus ignoring the experience of both the British and the Russians there, would be the height of folly and lead to disasters that would turn the Vietnam horror into a dry footnote in the theses of future Chinese historians.

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"This is by far the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression" Nouriel Roubini
"A total collapse of the US financial system, while not inevitable, is a contingency which should now be planned for." Martin Hutchinson, Prudent Bear

There is a lot of talk these days about the role of humor in American politics; whether or not a candidate is a suitable butt for jokes, whether or not they can "laugh at themselves" and so on and so on. Whether or not humor is "appropriate".

The American national pastime of navel gazing aside, whoever the next president of the United States is, besides having a sense of humor, he should, without delay, get fitted out for a clown suit, red ping-pong ball nose, clown white make up and all. Because that is going to be the role of the next POTUS on the world stage in the foreseeable future.

Losing two wars is something the world can chalk off to youthful folly, people seem ready to forgive and forget unprovoked invasions and the deaths and torture of hundreds of thousands of human beings; but destroying the livelihood of millions of people around the world though ideologically driven, financial frivolity is a little harder to swallow. They are going to resent it.

Whatever the world looks like in 2012, it's going to look as different from today as the world looked after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

If I were the next president of the US, I would try to inspire the people with a ringing speech.

My fellow Americans (pause): This is the time (pause, with meaningful gaze into the middle distance) This is the time (pause) for the American people... (pause) to dig deep into the wellsprings and treasures of our popular culture (long pause) to dig deep into our roots (pause), in order to find the strength and the inspiration to carry us through the difficult days to come.

My fellow Americans, Try this on for size.

(marine band strikes up, POTUS sings in a pleasing baritone):

Once I lived the life

Of a millionaire

Spending my money

Oh I didn't care

Taking my friends out

For a mighty good time

Buyin' high priced liquor

Champagne and wine

Oh but just as soon

As my money got low

I couldn't find nobody

And I had no place to go

In my pockets, not one penny

And as for my friends,

Man, I hadn't any

So, if I ever get my hands

On a dollar again

I'm gonna hold on to it

Till that big eagle grins

Cause it's mighty strange,

Without a doubt

Nobody wants you

When you're down and out

"Nobody wants you when you're down and out" - Jimmie Cox

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If I had to speculate, I would say that someone at the New Yorker Magazine is very, very, very pissed off at Barack Obama. This could be for any number of reasons ranging from his policy flip flops, down to a snub at a cocktail party.

What I am sure of that it is not just "innocent" satire. Innocent is the last word I would ever apply to the New Yorker... or to Barack Obama for that matter.

I agree with Mike Huckabee, when he was asked on Fox if the cover was just satire,

HUCKABEE: Well, I don't know how clear it is, though. It's clear to people who keep up to politics, but if you're walking down the corridor of an airport, you just happen to look over the bookstore, you're just going to see that image, and, frankly, I don't know that the average person who doesn't know "The New Yorker," who doesn't read the article, is going to get that it's satire.

    COLMES: If you see an image of Barack Obama -- Michelle looks like Angela Davis, you know, assault rifles, burning flag, Osama bin Laden, who in their right mind would take that seriously?

 HUCKABEE: A whole lot of people who don't bother to do anything other than just look at the image. Believe me, I've been a candidate, I'm telling you that there are a whole lot of people that don't get beyond the surface.

There are a lot of people who follow every bit of the news, but there are many Americans who just read the headlines or they hear the lead story, they don't dig down deep.

That cover -- I can understand why Obama was, you know, pretty burned about it. He was more burned than the flag over this.

The cover pictured above, which has caused such an uproar, is also an occasion to riff on an article in the New York Times. Here are some choice bits:

What’s so funny about Barack Obama? Apparently not very much, at least not yet.(...) Comedy has been no easier for the phalanx of late-night television hosts who depend on skewering political leaders for a healthy quotient of their nightly monologues. Jay Leno, David Letterman, Conan O’Brien and others have delivered a nightly stream of jokes about the Republican running for president — each one a variant on the same theme: John McCain is old.

    But there has been little humor about Mr. Obama: about his age, his speaking ability, his intelligence, his family, his physique. And within a late-night landscape dominated by white hosts, white writers, and overwhelmingly white audiences, there has been almost none about his race.(...) anything approaching a joke about Mr. Obama himself has fallen flat. When Mr. Stewart on “The Daily Show” recently tried to joke about Mr. Obama changing his position on campaign financing, for instance, he met with such obvious resistance from the audience, he said, “You know, you’re allowed to laugh at him.” Mr. Stewart said in a telephone interview on Monday, “People have a tendency to react as far as their ideology allows them.”(...) There is no doubt, several representatives of the late-night shows said, that so far their audiences (and at least some of the shows’ writers) seem to be favorably disposed toward Mr. Obama, to a degree that perhaps leaves them more resistant to jokes about him than those about most previous candidates.(...) Of course, the question of race is also mentioned as one reason Mr. Obama has proved to be so elusive a target for satire.

    “Anything that has even a whiff of being racist, no one is going to laugh,” said Rob Burnett, an executive producer for Mr. Letterman. “The audience is not going to allow anyone to do that.”(...) One issue that clearly has some impact on writing jokes about Mr. Obama is a consistency among the big late-night shows. Not only are all the hosts white, the vast majority of their audiences are white. “I think white audiences get a little self-conscious if race comes up,” Mr. Sweeney of Mr. O’Brien’s show said.(...) Jimmy Kimmel, the host of the ABC late-night talk show “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” said of Mr. Obama, “There’s a weird reverse racism going on. You can’t joke about him because he’s half-white. It’s silly. I think it’s more a problem because he’s so polished, he doesn’t seem to have any flaws.”

Humor is a royal gate into the subconscious and I think this article gives a key to an important thing that the white, college educated American middle classes are looking for in Barack Obama. In a land steeped in irony, the land of the loud raspberry, you are not allowed to laugh at him.

It isn't permitted to laugh at him because in the acceptable discourse of genteel America, it is not allowed to ridicule a person of color for any reason at all no matter how absurd they are and if anyone does so, it is permitted to look down on that person as a despicable, ignorant, racist, pig.

One of the most comical situations in American life is to see a well educated, middle class white American confronted with that rarest of creatures, an obnoxious African-American (some do actually exist, I'm told) and watch the good lady or gentleman tie him or herself into knots rather than to just tell a someone of color to get stuffed.

Mind you, this is totally hypocritical; skin color still blinds middle class Americans to obvious absurdities. For example, it allows middle class Americans to applaud and to nod approval when a person raised entirely by a white middle class family, with the means to send him to good prep school, solely because of his skin color, has the nerve, the unmitigated chutzpah to lecture the African-American community, as represented by the NAACP on "personal responsibility".

"Now, I know some say I've been too tough on folks about this responsibility stuff. But I'm not going to stop talking about it." While it is right to assail Washington and Wall Street for some of the inequality in the country, "we also have to demand more from ourselves," he said.(...) Obama reiterated his campaign stance that, even if they are disadvantaged, American blacks have to "do more in our own lives" rather than point the finger elsewhere.(...) "It starts with teaching our daughters to never allow images on television to tell them what they are worth; and teaching our sons to treat women with respect, and to realize that responsibility does not end at conception; that what makes them men is not the ability to have a child but the courage to raise one."

This speech is entirely and cynically pitched toward the white middle class and is as enormously cruel and insensitive as the "clinging to guns and religion" remark he made about poor whites.

The plight of contemporary poor black youth and the plight of poor white youth stem from dis-industrialization. I grew up in a town with a large black community and attended junior high and high school with African-Americans and in the 50s they all had fathers with jobs. Real working class, unionized jobs. Those jobs no longer exist.

It is cruel to say,

"What makes them men is not the ability to have a child but the courage to raise one."

It is cruel because as human beings, men and women, be they black or white, have to make love and children just happen: most of us just happened.

But to "raise a child" is also quite an ordinary thing that doesn't require courage so much as it does money and that in turn means steady jobs that pay enough to have an orderly home life. Poor blacks do crack and smack and poor whites do meths because... there are no jobs for people with little education that pay enough to make a home and to raise a family: they have no future.

Getting back to the point I raised before: America's educated, white, middle class want a president that can't be laughed at.

George W. Bush is the world's laughing stock, a figure of fun for the whole planet. This raucous laughter pains the educated, American middle class: these are people who travel and experience this derision and contempt as a personal affront, and who, behind their mild exterior, are as proud as Old Nick.

If nothing else they want the laughter to stop.

Bush is the laughing stock of the world, in part because of his ineptness, but mostly because America's chickens are finally coming home to roost, the next president is going to preside over a situation of near or perhaps real collapse of America's long held positions in both economic and military spheres.

Any post-Bush honeymoon the next president may have with the world will be very short lived and whoever he is, he too will soon be greeted by angry demonstrators all over the planet and by governments, like the Russians and the Chinese, that are not going to cut anybody any slack just because they are in their 70s or because their hair is curly and their teeth are pearly.

Obama or McCain, the next few years are going to be humiliating, but with president Obama, America's educated middle class and their wannabees will be able to smugly dismiss the jeering disrespect of the world as crude and ugly racism and thus maintain some sense of their own superiority and their belief in American Exceptionalism.

http://seaton-newslinks.blogspot.com/

Some Obama supporters worry that the spectacle of their candidate eagerly embracing his old rival, Hillary Clinton, and traveling the country courting big donors at lavish fund-raisers, may have done lasting damage to his image as an arbiter of a new kind of politics. This is a major concern since Obama's outsider credentials, have, in the past, played a large part in his appeal to moderate, swing voters. In the new poll, McCain leads Obama among independents 41 percent to 34 percent, with 25 percent favoring neither candidate. In June's NEWSWEEK Poll, Obama bested McCain among independent voters, 48 percent to 36 percent. Newsweek
________________________________

The American media elite chose to portray Obama as some kind of knight in armor. They're analysts. Yet they were desperate to believe in a political fairy tale from Chicago. Somewhere in this desperate yearning is an answer. Obama is not their fool. And he's not weak. He got down on one knee to the Chicago Democratic Machine and didn't make any waves and asked that it make him a U.S. senator. He lectured the Africans about political corruption and kept his mouth shut about corruption in Chicago, and the national press ignored the inconsistency and pampered and protected him. He waited and he's ready and now they're worried? Too late, boys and girls. John Kass, Chicago Tribune

There are all kinds of independents, left, right, center... you name it. They probably only have one trait in common: an aversion to drinking Kool-Aid.

Drinking Kool-Aid is about commitment, sacrificing core principals can only be justified, if it can be justified, in pursuit of a great cause.

Certainly, nothing could be more absurd than to drink  Kool-Aid with no ideological content whatsoever.

Newsweek wonders:

But perhaps most puzzling is how McCain could have gained traction in the past month.

That is a no-brainer.

This election is not about McCain, it is about Obama,

McCain cannot win, but Obama can lose.

My reading of Barack Obama that he is his own space or he is no space at all. His secret has been the charm of his difference. If he loses that special quality, and by now there is little left, it will be like Cinderella's coach turning back into a pumpkin and all the pretty horses back into scurrying, little mice.

That is what is happening now, I predict it will go very fast once it starts and that some of the super-delegates may begin to have second thoughts by the end of the month.

The Democrats have thrown a once in a generation opportunity away.
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