International Relations -- Looking Ahead At The Debate

September 22, 2008

by Faiz Shakir, Amanda Terkel, Satyam Khanna, Matt Corley, Benjamin Armbruster, Ali Frick, Ryan Powers, and Matt Duss

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

Looking Ahead At The Debate

This Friday's presidential debate will focus on foreign policy. Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) said in 2005 that on "transcendent issues" like the war on terror, he is in "total agreement" with President Bush. McCain's foreign policy ideas bear this out. Like Bush, McCain contends that Iraq is the "central front" in the war on terror, ignoring the fact that there was no al Qaeda in Iraq before there was America Iraq. Invading Iraq has radicalized scores of young Muslims, who have traveled to Iraq and learned terrorist tactics, which they have now begun to bring back to their home countries. In remarks to the Council on Foreign Relations on November 5, 2003, McCain responded to a question about whether the United States would "finish the job" in Afghanistan by saying that "we may muddle through." As a result of the diversion of resources and attention to an unnecessary war in , al Qaeda and the Taliban have regrouped in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border areas and waged an increasingly lethal insurgency. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Michael Mullen recently told the House of Representatives Armed Services Committee, "I'm not convinced we are winning it in Afghanistan…Frankly, we're running out of time." In July, Mullen told reporters, "I don't have troops I can reach for, brigades I can reach to send into Afghanistan, until I have a reduced requirement in Iraq." McCain has consistently opposed drawing down troops from Iraq.

PROMOTING THE SURGE, IGNORING HIS ROLE AS WAR CHEERLEADER: McCain has made his support for the Iraq surge central to his campaign but ignores the fact that the surge has not delivered on its central objective: achieving a sustainable power consolidation among Iraq's different political forces. According to a recent report from the Center for American Progress, "Iraq's Political Transition After the Surge," the surge "has frozen into place the accelerated fragmentation that Iraq underwent in 2006 and 2007 and has created disincentives to bridge central divisions between Iraqi factions." These factions remain at loggerheads over significant issues such as the oil law, constitutional reform, and the status of the city of Kirkuk. McCain has also tried to de-couple his support for the surge from his strident advocacy of the 2003 invasion, insisting that the latter is simply a matter for historians to debate. The fact remains that a surge of 30,000 troops to Iraq would not have been necessary if not for the disastrous decision to invade Iraq in the first place. The Iraq war has resulted in the deaths of over 4,000 American servicemen and women and has left over 30,000 seriously wounded. The war has also resulted in the deaths of an estimated 150,000 Iraqis, with many more wounded and maimed, and over 4 million displaced, both within and outside the country. Economists Joseph Stiglitz of Columbia and Linda Bilmes of Harvard estimated the total cost of the Iraq war to U.S. taxpayers at around $3 trillion. McCain has said that, even knowing that Saddam had no WMD and no connections to al Qaeda, "there's no question" he would still have voted to authorize the war.

A HARDER LINE THAN BUSH: In the few areas where McCain and Bush disagree, McCain proposes an even harder line than Bush, promising to continue policies that the Bush administration has discarded. President Bush now recognizes the necessity of talking with Iran abandon[ing] its longstanding position that it would meet face to face with Iran only after the country suspended its uranium enrichment,” and sending Undersecretary of State William Burns to accompany a European Union delegation during a meeting with Iran's top nuclear official in July. At a recent panel, five former U.S. secretaries of state -- Henry Kissinger, Colin Powell, Madeleine Albright, Warren Christopher, and James Baker -- all agreed that "the next American administration should talk to Iran." Kissinger specifically supported negotiating with Iran "without conditions," which McCain has called naive and irresponsible. McCain also advocates a hard line against North Korea, using language that the Washington Post recognized as "remarkably similar to President Bush's first-term rhetoric." McCain has broken with the Bush administration’s new policy of diplomatic engagement, under which North Korea has provided greater disclosure of its nuclear activities, and destroyed part of its weapons-building reactor. President Bush has recognized as "important first steps toward the goal of a nuclear weapons-free Korean peninsula." McCain's approach would turn back these gains.

A HYSTERIA-BASED FOREIGN POLICY: McCain's hysterical response to the Russia-Georgia conflict is a troubling indication of how he would handle future international crises. McCain immediate reaction was to declare it "the first probably serious crisis internationally since the end of the Cold War," this after having spent months declaring the threat of Islamic radicalism "the transcendent challenge of our time." Even before the Russia-Georgia crisis, McCain had advocated an aggressive posture toward Russia, suggesting that Russia should be thrown out of the G8. Newsweek's Fareed Zakaria called this "the most radical idea put forward by a major candidate for the presidency in 25 years, a policy that would alienate many countries in Europe and Asia who would see it as an attempt by Washington to begin a new cold war. McCain's anti-Russia stance has serious implications for efforts to contain Iran's nuclear ambitions. Many of America's allies, including the Israelis, believe that Russia's cooperation is essential for dealing with the Iranian nuclear program. In a recent interview, McCain also refused to commit to a meeting with Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Zapatero, even though Spain is an important NATO ally with more than 700 troops in Afghanistan. After eight years of arrogant unilateralism, McCain proposes a foreign policy approach that would do more to alienate America's allies, and make it more difficult to work together with other countries to address common threats.

ECONOMY -- BUSH'S LEGACY OF SQUANDERING TAXPAYER MONEY: This weekend, President Bush proposed a massive, $700 billion buyout of troubled financial institutions, in a plan that "would place no restrictions on the administration" and stipulates that actions by the Treasury Secretary "are non-reviewable...and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency." The proposal also would grant the Treasury the power to hire outside firms "to help manage its purchases." Given Bush's history of fiscal mismanagement -- particularly when it comes to hiring contractors -- Americans should be skeptical of his new plan. In Iraq, $142 million was wasted on projects that were either terminated or canceled, a "significant" amount of U.S. funds have been funneled to Sunni and Shiite militia groups, $5.1 billion in expenses has been charged without proper documentation, and another $10 billion has been wasted or poorly tracked, to name just a few examples. Bush's response to Hurricane Katrina was equally mismanaged. An estimated $2 billion was spent in fraud and waste, nearly 11 percent of the total spent by FEMA in the first year following the hurricane. In the area of defense spending, the Pentagon reported $1 trillion it could not account for in 2003. It also paid $1.7 billion in excessive fees to the Interior Department, and another $50 million Air Force contract was awarded in a process "fraught with improper influence, irregular procedures, and glaring conflicts of interest." It's no wonder that Princeton economist Paul Krugman called the Treasury's demand for "dictatorial authority" "an unacceptable proposal."

ENVIRONMENT -- THE WHITE HOUSE PRESSURES THE EPA TO NOT LIMIT PERCHLORATE IN TAP WATER: "Under pressure from the White House and the Pentagon," the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) "is poised to rule as early as today that it will not set a drinking-water safety standard for perchlorate, a component of rocket fuel that has been linked to thyroid problems in pregnant women, newborns and young children across the nation," the Washington Post reports. A near-final version of the EPA's "preliminary regulatory determination" that the Post obtained "assumes the maximum allowable perchlorate contamination level is 15 times what the EPA had suggested in 2002." The proposal is "the final step in a six-year-old battle between career EPA scientists who advocate regulating the chemical and White House and Pentagon officials who oppose it." Officials in the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) "heavily edited" the document by eliminating key passages and asking the EPA to "use a new computer modeling approach to calculate the chemical's risks." In 2004, the EPA's process for scientific risk assessments of chemicals was altered to give OMB oversight of the program, which increased the ability of other departments to interfere in the program secretly. Last spring, the Government Accountability Office reported "that the Pentagon had pressured the EPA for several years not to regulate perchlorate."

GUANTANAMO -- PENTAGON REASSIGNS CONTROVERSIAL GUANTANAMO LEGAL ADVISER AS WAR COURT CZAR: As legal adviser at Guantanamo Bay, Brig. Gen. Thomas Hartmann has been one of the most aggressive advocates for the Bush administration's flawed military commissions. In fact, three separate judges have barred him from acting as an impartial legal adviser at the trial of detainees. Judge Stephen Henley said that Hartmann had "compromised the objectivity necessary to dispassionately and fairly evaluate the evidence and prepare the post-trial evaluation." In the case of Salim Hamdan, a military judge ruled that Hartmann had "exerted improper influence on the case." The Pentagon has now quietly removed Hartmann. But as the Miami Herald notes, instead of being fired, Hartmann has essentially become a "war court czar in charge of logistics." In an interview with the Miami Herald, Hartmann said that in his new job, he would be making sure that war on terror prosecutions move along briskly. "I want those courtrooms to be as filled up as they can possibly be -- six days a week," he said. At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in December 2007, Hartmann repeatedly refused to call the hypothetical waterboarding of an American pilot by the Iranian military torture. Shortly thereafter, Lt. Cmdr. Andrew Williams, a JAG officer with the U.S. Naval Reserve, resigned, saying that Hartmann's testimony was the "last straw" and "sold all the soldiers and sailors at risk of capture and subsequent torture down the river."

Having spent 20 years and millions of dollars "loudly and bitterly attacking the liberal leanings of American campuses," conservatives "have failed to make much of a dent in the way undergraduates are educated." In a new strategy, they "are finding like-minded tenured professors and helping them establish academic beachheads for their ideas."

Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley "will transform themselves into bank holding companies subject to far greater regulation," the Federal Reserve announced last night. The New York Times describes the change at the last big independent investment banks on Wall Street as "a move that fundamentally reshapes an era of high finance that defined the modern Gilded Age."

In the midst of the current credit crisis, Americans are "cutting back on health care, a sector once thought to be invulnerable to recession." Spending on doctor's appointments and preventive tests is down while "the number of prescriptions filled in the U.S. fell 0.5% in the first quarter and a steeper 1.97% in the second," compared with 2007 -- the first negative quarters in the last decade.

The trial of Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK) begins today, "marking the first time in more than 27 years that a sitting Senator will face a federal jury." Stevens was "indicted in July for failing to report gifts from an Alaska oil-services company."

"Congressional Democrats began to set their own terms on Sunday for a plan to rescue the nation’s financial institutions, including greater legislative oversight of the Treasury Department, more direct assistance for homeowners and limits on the pay of top executives whose firms seek help."

Three years after the Defense Department set out to increase the number of foreign language specialists within its ranks, little progress has been made. Only "1.2 percent of the military receives a bonus paid to those who can speak languages judged to be of critical importance for the current conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as other areas of strategic concern."

And finally: Politics took center stage last night’s Emmy awards ceremony. Co-host Howie Mandel began the night by noting that he didn't have an opening monologue: "We are like on Sarah Palin's bridge to nowhere, that's where we are right now. The government can’t even bail us out of this." Comedian Tommy Smothers, who won an honorary Emmy, dedicated his award to "all people who feel compelled to speak out." Jon Stewart, who won an award for The Daily Show, said, "I really look forward to the next administration whoever it is. I have nothing to follow that up with."

"Trapping and burying carbon dioxide from power plants could become viable without public funding by 2030, helping nations reduce their dependence on energy imports and meet climate goals," a report from McKinsey consultancy said Monday.

THINK PROGRESS: Rep. John Boehner (R-OH): Treasury's bailout package should help only Wall Street, not Main Street.

WONK ROOM: Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) kills air pollution clean-up, wants to review "the entire Clean Air Act."

YGLESIAS: The legislative chess needed for progressive lawmakers to avert a disaster with the bailout.

OPEN LEFT: Some members of Congress are deeply angry about President Bush's proposed blank check bailout for Wall Street.

WISCONSIN: "Wisconsin's Attorney General has sued the state election's board, accusing it of failing to act to prevent voter fraud."

ECONOMY: "For millions of Americans approaching retirement, events of recent weeks are delivering a clear message: Not so fast."

CALIFORNIA: Controversial state budget is complete, "but no one is thrilled about it."

"Once a Bushie, always a Bushie."
-- White House Press Secretary Dana Perino, 12/9/07

VERSUS

"I don't think you can take your experience in Washington working with the Bush administration and emphasize that on your resumé."
-- Former Bush adviser Matthew Dowd, 9/19/08

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Looking Ahead At The Debate

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