President Barack Obama is “getting bad advice from… clowns” on Afghanistan and “sucking up to the wrong people” on health care, U.S. Rep. John Conyers told a Detroit radio audience this morning, according to show host Rev. Horace Sheffield.
Conyers, a Detroit Democrat, made the comments during a discussion about the effects of the economic recession on the urban poor, Sheffield said. The liberal congressman expressed frustration that health care legislation pending in Washington, D.C., was too solicitous of insurance companies and special interests, Sheffield said.
“He wasn’t angry. He was just deeply concerned that some of the issues being focused on don’t address the human reality,” said Sheffield, who hosts the program “On The Line” on WGPR-FM radio.
You can view this video right here by getting the latest version of Flash Player!
DOWNLOADS: 160
PLAYS: 16
(Berlin - chafing at the bit for the catastrophe to start)
The last diplomatic gestures exhausted, and Germany issuing a sixteen point list of demands for Poland, the evacuation from major cities of children and invalids began, with an estimated 3 million slated to evacuate London alone.
BBC Newsreader: “The German wireless tonight issued a sixteen point program, which it described as Germany’s reply to the latest British note. At what stage this sixteen point plan was advanced is not at present clear, because as of a short time ago it was known that the German government had sent to London no official reply to the note which was received in Berlin last night. Nor had Poland sent any reply to a British note informing her of the previous communication from Herr Hitler. Germany demanded One: that the free city of Danzig, on account of its purely German character and the unanimous will of its population, should return to the Reich unconditionally and forthwith. Two: that the corridor shall decide itself whether it shall belong to Germany or to Poland, and for this purpose a plebiscite shall be held. Three: That all Germans and Poles who have been resident in the corridor since the first of January 1918, or have been born there shall be entitled to vote in the plebiscite, and that all Germans who have been expelled from the corridor, or were forced to leave, shall return there in order to cast their votes.”
A list of impossible demands, making it clear that Germany was determined to go to war and invade Poland as quickly as possible. August 31st would be the last good day in Europe for a while.
You can view this video right here by getting the latest version of Flash Player!
DOWNLOADS: 157
PLAYS: 38
(We weren't too popular then either.)
Seems not a whole lot has changed the last 40 years, with regards to our standing in the eyes of the world. We have been liked as a people, but despised as a government. How we've managed to trash allies and solidify movements against us. How we've been actively engaged in mutual alienation of every country around us. I was thinking about that as I watched the BBC coverage of President Obama in Cairo this morning. How the right wing so desperately wants us to be isolationist in our foreign policy while at the same time embracing cheap sources of overseas labor in the name of Free Enterprise. And how much work needs to be done in the area of diplomacy just to put things on even keel again.
I thought maybe the problem was the result of the last 8 disastrous years. No. It goes back a lot further than that. According to this documentary from the Second Sunday Radio series "A World Reflection: How they see us", it's been going steadily downhill since the mid-1960's. A long time for a lot to go wrong. And a snap of the finger isn't going to make it right.
As with everything that's been done the past 8 years, repairing damage and surveying the wreckage is going to take a long time. Maybe even decades.
But here is how it was viewed on September 12, 1971.
President Barack Obama recorded a video message of celebration for Nowruz, the Persian New Year. After decades of mindless demonization, this is an especially amazing reaching out to the Iranian people:
This year, the President wanted to send a special message to the people and government of Iran on Nowruz, acknowledging the strain in our relations over the last few decades. "But at this holiday we are reminded of the common humanity that binds us together," he says.
After committing his administration to a future of honest and respectful diplomacy, he continues on to address Iran's leaders directly: "You, too, have a choice. The United States wants the Islamic Republic of Iran to take its rightful place in the community of nations. You have that right -- but it comes with real responsibilities, and that place cannot be reached through terror or arms, but rather through peaceful actions that demonstrate the true greatness of the Iranian people and civilization. And the measure of that greatness is not the capacity to destroy, it is your demonstrated ability to build and create."
Now, I'm sure that this will make the neo-cons and their media leaders burst a blood vessel...but let us not forget who the last president was that reached out to the Iranian people: St. Ronnie.
One of the things that I've found most disconcerting about American news coverage of Iran is the complete disconnect between what our own (and international) intelligence reports say and the almost rapturous assurance by the media and public officials that Iran is heading full bore towards our nuclear annihilation. Sean Paul Kelly @ The Agonist:
SZ: In your report it says that Iran is gaining an ever greater mastery of uranium enrichment. Can the USA and Israel accept the fact that Iran is on the threshold of becoming a virtual nuclear power?
ELBARADEI: The question is, what can they do? What are the alternatives to direct negotiations? As long as we are monitoring their facilities, they cannot develop nuclear weapons. And they still do not have the ingredients to make a bomb overnight.
How hard is it to google this sh*t?
Update: As Paul Kerr, from Total WonKerr, just wrote to me in an email: "Here's the number of weapons you can make with LEU: zero." Any questions?
Hurts your "Oooh...be scared of the bogeyman" fear-mongering when you inject actual facts and science into it, doesn't it? Whirled View and my buddy Cernig look further.
Whitehouse.gov has a summary of the Obama/Biden administration's foreign policy platform up. There are no radical departures from the campaign, but of course now the policy prescriptions there are on the official White House website as official presidential policy. They include a refocus on Afghanistan and Pakistan, holding Pakistan more accountable, supporting Israel come what may, adding America's weight to "the Millennium Development Goal of cutting extreme poverty and hunger around the world in half by 2015", de-politicizing the intelligence community and repairing America's tattered diplomatic initiatives.
But Julian Borger at the UK's Guardian makes special note of two elements of Obama's campaign platform that are now official US policy and are sure to make rightwing heads explode:
The new Obama administration is willing to talk to Iran "without preconditions" and will work towards the abolition of nuclear weapons, the White House said today.
The Obama foreign policy agenda that appeared on the White House website said: "Barack Obama supports tough and direct diplomacy with Iran without preconditions," the policy outline said. The Bush administration made direct talks between the US and Iran conditional on Iranian suspension of its uranium enrichment programme. This step breaks that conditionality, as part of a fundamental shift in diplomatic approach. The Obama agenda said the new administration will "talk to our foes and friends" and not set preconditions.
However, talks with Iran will be "tough and direct", and will put on the table the same deal that the international community has been trying to get Tehran to accept for the past four years: extensive economic and diplomatic help if uranium enrichment is suspended, further economic pressure and diplomatic isolation if it does not. Iran has resisted this carrot-and-stick approach so far, despite four sets of UN sanctions, but western diplomats hope that direct engagement by Washington will help break the impasse. "In carrying out this diplomacy, we will coordinate closely with our allies and proceed with careful preparation," the White House said. "Seeking this kind of comprehensive settlement with Iran is our best way to make progress."
The other notable shift in US foreign policy announced today was a strategic decision to move towards a "nuclear free world", through bilateral and multilateral disarmament. "Obama and [Vice President Joe] Biden will set a goal of a world without nuclear weapons, and pursue it," according to the agenda. It is a long term goal. The US will maintain a "strong deterrent as long as nuclear weapons exist", but begin to take steps on the "long road towards eliminating nuclear weapons".
Gareth Porter discusses Obama's possible Iran options with The Real News Network.
Veteran IPS investigative reporter Gareth Porter recently spent 12 days in Iran, interviewing Iranian leadership figures. He discussed with them their expectations of the Obama administration, the geopolitical situation in the region and their own hopes for Iran. Gareth has written a series of articles for IPS exploring his findings, but I also got a chance to ask him some questions in amongst his busy schedule. Perhaps the most important impressions he came away from Iran with are that most people there truly believe that their nation's nuclear program is a peaceful one and that "the Iranian leadership is prepared to enter into full-scale serious negotiations on the full range of issues with the United States, provided that it gets signals from the Obama administration that it intends to break with key elements of the Bush administration’s policy."
Here is that interview, in full.
Cernig: We often hear that the Iranian people love America even if their rulers do not. Does your experience agree with this?
Gareth Porter: Certainly people in Tehran are very friendly to Americans on a personal level. I think the viewpoint about “America” is much more variegated, however, depending on political views about both domestic politics in Iran and U.S. policy.
C: We also hear that Iran's rulers use opposition to America and the West as a patriotic lever to stay in power. Is this true, and how does the Bush administration's policy affect Iranian feelings about their leaders?
GP: There is no doubt that President Ahmadinejad has exploited nationalism and popular perceptions of U.S. and Western aggressiveness toward Iran – especially over the nuclear issue – as part of his appeal to his base of practicing Muslims in smaller cities and in the rural areas. That appeal does not work very well in Tehran and other larger cities, however. As for the Islamic regime more generally, I do not have the impression that it depends on hostility toward the West to remain in power. Certainly there have been times (e.g., the early to mid-1990s) when the regime was consciously seeking to improve relations with the West over a considerable period of time, and that strategy was evidently adopted in the belief that the economic benefits of a reduction in tensions would benefit the regime rather than harm it.
Despite a summer deadline to pull American combat troops from urban areas, thousands will stay in cities to support and train Iraqis, the top U.S. commander in Iraq said Saturday.
Even with the mandate in the recently approved U.S.-Iraq security agreement, there have been suggestions some troops would not leave urban areas. But Gen. Raymond Odierno was the first military leader to acknowledge some forces would remain at local security stations, as training and mentoring teams.
"We believe we should still be inside those after the summer," he said the sprawling U.S. base in Balad, north of Baghdad before welcoming Defense Secretary Robert Gates on a brief visit.
Mr. Gates met with General Odierno for an hour later in the day and then was scheduled to return to Washington. Before the meeting, Mr. Gates held a question-and-answer session with American soldiers and reiterated the Bush administration’s pledge to the Iraqi government of a complete troop withdrawal by the end of 2011.
But General Odierno said Saturday, as Pentagon officials have said previously, that the agreement might be renegotiated with the Iraqi government.
“Three years is a very long time,” General Odierno told reporters.
And Gates didn't fire him on the spot, so it will be assumed he (and Bush, and Obama) are just fine with all this. I wonder what the various Iraqi factions will say? Viceroy Odierno just handed Maliki (and Obama) a big problem in the form of an "I am a US puppet" button and a target on his back. If Noor al-Napoleon doesn't say "no, the deal must be stuck to", and loudly, then the others will eat him alive.
On a wider stage, if the Bush administration doesn't rap Odierno hard then Obama will have blown some of his capital in foreign places before his administration can even begin because Odierno, a Bush appointee, has indicated that the U.S. will continue to try to bend treaties and deals all out of shape instead of sticking to its word. Yet another Bush administration spoiler.
Crossposted from Newshoggers
Did anyone think that the people who managed to slant US analysis so badly that it was sure there were WMDs in Iraq would give up easily on agitating for their next war of choice, Iran? In their last months with free run of the corridors of power, the necons and Cheneyites are doing their best to torpedo Obama's diplomatic route for Iran, something Democratic hawks and AIPACers are only too happy to aid them in.
For over a year now, their aim has been to create "strategic ambiguity" - deliberately muddying the waters about Israeli and American intentions so as to pressure Iran in its negotiations with the West by ensuring it fears an attack if it doesn't play ball. D.C. hawks have gotten on board to such an extent that it is already an accepted fact among the Very Serious Person set that Obama's idea of negotiation without preconditions will get exactly one shot, will fail, and then the bombs will begin to fall.
There's more of the same in Haaretz this Thursday, reporting a planted story that Obama will extend the U.S. nuclear umbrella to Israel, which has plenty of nukes itself. The story is sourced to a single someone "close to the new administration". Whether that source is someone like Dennis Ross, Susan Rice or Tony Lake - all of whom have been cozy with the "real men go to Tehran" faction recently - or actually outside Obama's nascent administration looking in, even perhaps a part of the Bush team's transition liason, is unclear. Haaretz might even be the target of deliberate disinformation or making the story up out of whole cloth in a way that can't be proven. But one of those Real Men, Jim Geraghty, is beside himself with glee that the idea was first put out there by another Manly Man, Charles Krauthammer, back in April.
When he proposed it, liberals declared this idea was evidence that Krauthammer is insane. When Hillary Clinton echoed the proposal, Keith Olbermann said it was "far further to the right than John McCain. This may be far further to the right than the Bush administration policy about the Middle East, which you didn't think was physically possible." Rachel Maddow said it was "hard to imagine a conception of American interests broad enough to make this a prudent promise to make to the world, particularly to this volatile part of the world."
Hear that, netroots? From Krauthammer's column to Obama administration policy. Glad you put all that effort into beating McCain, huh?
The proposal is, of course, insane and idiotic, as Haaretz notes even some in the Bush administration admit.
Rupert Murdoch's Jerusalem Post has to keep finding its daily quota of Iranian fearmongering and war hype. No other Israeli newspaper keeps, as a permanent and prominent section right after Headlines and before those for other Missle East or international news, one entitled "The Threat From Iran". Today, it reported anonymously sourced claims that Israel is ready to go it alone in attacking Iran, after the US has repeatedly refused to co-operate in airstrikes.
It is, of course, an insane notion -- one designed to keep up the pressure of bellicose rhetoric aimed at Iran in the mistaken idea that the Iranian regime will thus become less entrenched and enjoy less domestic support. Even some conservative commentators know this (Ed Morrissey for one):
So far, Obama has only nominated one ambassador - career professional Susan Rice as ambassador to the UN. Here she is in September talking about Obama's foreign policy.
Following up on reports of Obama's intended Herculean cleaning of the Agean Stables at the Department of Defense, where the entire body of Bush-appointed deputies and under-whatevers are expected to be fired, the Washington Post now reports that the incoming Obama administration has told every single Bush political appointee as an ambassador that their services will no longer be required come January 20th.
That's an awful lot of ambassadors. An unusually high percentage of Bush's ambassador picks throughout his presidency - about half - have been "political appointees," as opposed to career foreign officers and without fail those political appointees have been big campaign donors, each raising over $100,000 for Bush and lots more for the Republican Party.
Nations that have had these, usually clueless, ambassadors foisted upon them just so that Bush could thank his biggest funders with a prestige sinecure include: Canada, Mexico, Britain, Sweden, the Netherlands, Spain, Australia, Belgium, Hungary, Ireland, Saudi Arabia, France, Portugal, Switzerland, Singapore and the European Union as well as a host of smaller nations. The United States is the only nation which habitually staffs its top diplomatic positions in other countries with check-writing rank amateurs rather than professional diplomats.
There's a rapidly developing consensus among Washington's Very Serious person set that Obama's plans to negotiate with Iran should get only one try, and if that fails then the bombing should begin.
Today Iran's parliamentary Speaker and the Ayatollah's most trusted negotiator, Ali Larijani, told the press that Iran's parliament is considering a request from the U.S. Congress to "parliamentary negotiations between the two countries". (And just wait till the wingnuts start howlking about a Dem Congress sidelining the Lame Duck In Chief!) Also today, France's President Sarkozy partly walked back his previous confrontational rhetoric on Iran and said that Obama's statements "reflect our shared views on the necessity of dialogue without concessions with Tehran as the only way to obtain a negotiated end to the crisis."
It would seem that prospects for an international consensus on negotiations, and prospects for Iran actually taking those negotiations seriously, are quite hopeful. Yet David Ignatius in today's WaPo leads the bellicose VSP charge to give Obama a very short timeline to make any diplomatic initiatives work, echoing the tack of more rightwing and neocon thinktanks.
He begins by lamenting the fact that the Bush administration's hawks appear to have failed in their push to attack Iran and then recapitulates hawkish hype over Iran's nuclear program, conveniently forgetting that both the IAEA and the last US intelligence community's NIE say there's no evidence Iran has a weapons program behind its civilian one. He then goes on to catalogue repeated Bush administration failures in the diplomatic arena, seemingly without irony, and to say that Obama must have a Plan B if his own venture fails at the first hurdle.
Dutch journalist Thomas Erdbrink, who is based in Tehran, has a must-read piece today in the Washington Post which details how, now that Obama is the President-Elect and offering no-precondition talks, non-trivial but junior members of the Iranian government are making noises about walking back their own offers to hold unconditional talks.
“People who put on a mask of friendship, but with the objective of betrayal, and who enter from the angle of negotiations without preconditions, are more dangerous,” Hossein Taeb, deputy commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, said Wednesday, according to the semiofficial Mehr News Agency.
... In recent interviews, advisers to Ahmadinejad said the new U.S. administration would have to pull U.S. troops out of Iraq, show respect for Iran's system of rule by a supreme religious leader, and withdraw its objections to Iran's nuclear program before it can enter into negotiations with the Iranian government.
Ahmadinejad's media adviser, Mehdi Kalhor, said that "in fair circumstances" Iran would be open to talks. "But that is not when you have a bayonet pressed at your artery," he added, referring to the U.S. forces deployed in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf.
All this provides neocon hawks with the perfect opportunity to bang the "prefidious Iranians" drum, and Ed Morrissey doesn't miss that chance:
This is the point that Obama and his allies never seem to understand. Some people just hate us, and not because of our policies on trade and security. Iran is a nation run by radical Islamist mullahs who see secular democracy as the enemy of their religion, and Western values as a temporary heresy which they plan to correct with a global caliphate under Iranian control.
Irans’ mullahs see America as the bastion of these values, and Israel as our outpost for them in the region. Europe is mostly irrelevant to them; they can deal with Europe after eliminating the arsenal of democracy, or hobbling it so badly that we no longer make a difference.
All of a sudden, you’re deprived of a method of demagoguery that’s aided your regime for a generation. And if you refuse to negotiate, you’ve just undermined everything you told the international community you wanted, and now appear unreasonable, erratic, and unattractive to foreign capitols. Amazing how the prospects for peace are more destabilizing to the Iranian establishment than any inevitably-counterproductive-and-destructive bombing campaign or war of internal subterfuge.
That's an analysis born out by Erdbrink's past work too. Back in 2004, he co-wrote a Time piece which pointed out that "dominant hard-line clerics are worried that friendly American behavior might aid reformers, who are less anti-Western than the conservatives."
There's a presidential election in Iran next year and a moderate now heads the committee which would choose the replacement for the ailing Ayatollah. In other words, it's not about nukes or about international opinion - its about the shakier thrones Irans hardline government now find themselves sitting upon; with the best weapon in their arsenal, Bush's neocon ways, consigned to history.
On the streets of Tehran, Reuters recorded some video "postcards to Obama" from ordinary Iranians back on Nov. 5th. The message - carry through on negotiations, forget the hawks.
"If there is a direct dialogue between the United States and Iran, I think Iran will be more forthcoming with the agency," IAEA Director Mohamed ElBaradei said.
"(A) political opening will also convince Iran to work with us to solve remaining technical issues," he told a news conference in Prague after meeting Czech Foreign Affairs Minister Karel Schwarzenberg.
"That political component of the (Iran) issue requires in my view a direct dialogue with Iran and that's why I am very encouraged by President-elect Obama's statement that he is ready to engage Iran in a direct dialogue without preconditions.
El-Baradei, who was one of those that said plainly that Iraq had no extant WMD and was thanked for being right by a Bush administration push to replace him, also underlined that, to date, there is no proof Iran is seeking nuclear weapons either.
We are able to verify all their declared activities, we are able to verify their enrichment programme, which is a good thing. But we are still not able to move forward on clarifying some of the outstanding issues related to alleged studies that could have some linkage to a possible military dimension."
Iran says its nuclear plans are to make electricity so it can export more oil and gas.
"There is a lot of concern about Iran, not today but about Iran in future... whether once they develop the technology, what are they going to use it for, whether they will go for nuclear weapons," said ElBaradei.
"That is the concern shared by the Security Council." [Emphaisis Mine - C]
There's a lot in that snippet to unpack.
First of all, there's the unequivocal statement that everything the IAEA has so far checked has come up clean - a civilian program only and one that cannot now be re-directed to military uses without IAEA foreknowledge...
That warning period would be at least six months and possibly a whole year long, so why is anyone still talking about keeping military options on the table? Saber rattling is counter-productive in such a circumstance - there's plenty of time to put talk of such options back in process if Iran ever makes a move to re-enrich to bomb-grade but for now there is no such program.
Secondly - the "alleged" studies el-Baradei refers to are all from 2003 and earlier, from a time when US intelligence says Iran did have a nuke program, in a very early stage, which has since been shut down. Notice all those conditionals?
