Oh, cripes. If I didn’t already loathe Lieberman having The Pasty Little Putz bring him up would be reason enough. In “A War President?” the PLP says Senator Joe Lieberman is just one of many people waiting to find out if President Obama truly believes that the war he inherited in Afghanistan is a war of necessity. I don’t trust myself to say anything about Lieberman or why anyone would give a flying fuck at a rolling donut about what he thinks… Mr. Cohen, in “The U.S.–Iranian Triangle,” says Iran’s nuclear program is about the restoration of pride, and any sanctions are predisposed to failure. Instead, the U.S. must open talks on a broad array of issues between the two countries. Prof. Krugman discusses the “Cassandras of Climate,” and says as climate scientists have begun reaching consensus that Earth’s outlook is getting worse at greater speed, the need for government action is thrown into sharper relief. Here’s that babbling putz:
All spring and summer, it looked as though Joe Lieberman, the independent from Connecticut, would play the same role in the debate over President Obama’s Afghanistan policy that he played in the struggle over Iraq: as a champion of the surge-style counterinsurgency that Obama endorsed in March and as a defender of a wartime White House against the Democratic Party’s leftward flank.
But that was before Afghanistan’s fraud-riddled elections, before Obama’s new top commander there, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, came back with a dire report and a request for further reinforcements and before a spooked White House entered full-scale reassessment mode.
Now, while Obama weighs his options, Lieberman is waiting to find out if he’s going to be the president’s ally on Afghanistan or one of his sharpest critics.
In a conversation last week, the Connecticut senator was careful to avoid taking the president to task for pausing before he escalates. After seven years of war, Lieberman noted, we’ve only now “begun the first serious national debate about Afghanistan: whether we should be there and what we should be doing there. In that regard, it’s entirely appropriate that the president is deliberating.”
But he was simultaneously careful to imply that Obama’s ultimate decision should be a foregone conclusion — not least because the president’s past statements allow for no alternative.
Throughout our discussion, Lieberman repeatedly cited Obama’s own arguments (“as the president said the other day. …”) to buttress the case for sending more troops to Afghanistan. And he suggested, more than once, that the president’s choice essentially amounts to deciding whether to abandon a strategy to which Obama has already committed himself.
I heard a similar theme, in public and private, from many counterinsurgency advocates last week. Having recently described Afghanistan as a “war of necessity,” they asked, can the president really turn down a request for more troops from a general he himself appointed to support a campaign that he personally endorsed?
The answer is very likely no. However serious his doubts about escalation, Obama seems boxed in — by the thoroughness of McChrystal’s assessment and the military’s united front, by his own arguments across the last two years and by his party’s long-running insistence on painting Afghanistan as the neglected “good war.”
But if Obama takes us deeper into war out of political necessity rather than conviction, the results could be disastrous.
That’s because the counterinsurgency strategy he’s contemplating is the worst possible option — except for all the others. It looks attractive only because the alternatives involve abandoning southern Afghanistan to the Taliban’s tender mercies, playing Whac-a-Mole with Al Qaeda from afar with hopelessly inadequate intelligence and pushing the nuclear-armed Pakistani military back into a marriage of necessity with a resurgent Taliban next door.
Even allowing for these perils, the case for escalation remains a near-run thing. In the words of Stephen Biddle, who advised McChrystal on the review, increasing our military involvement in Afghanistan is “a close call on the merits,” whose “outcome is uncertain” and which is “likely to increase losses and violence in the short term in exchange for a chance at stability in the longer term.”
This kind of war may well be worth fighting. But it can only be prosecuted by a president who believes in it wholeheartedly.
It will have to be sold to an American public battered by recession and weary of seven years of conflict.
It will require rallying a Democratic Party whose support for sending more troops to Afghanistan — the better to outhawk the Republicans — has vanished with the Bush presidency.
And it will need to be conducted with a constant eye not only on Iran, but on the fragile situation in Iraq, which has fallen out of the headlines but remains, even now, our most important military theater.
In other words, fighting to win in Afghanistan will require that Obama become as much of a war president as his predecessor. And that’s a role for which he has shown little appetite to date.
Maybe this will change. “My hope,” Lieberman told me, is that once Obama finishes his “very public process of deliberation, he will have brought the public along with him” — and placed the war effort on a firmer footing in the process.
But the president can only bring the country with him if he really believes in the war that he’s inherited. For now, that remains an open question.
And if Obama takes us deeper into a conflict for which he doesn’t really have the stomach, then the outcome will almost certainly be tragic — for him, for us, and for Afghanistan.
Here’s Mr. Cohen:
France and Germany fought three wars in 70 years before the bright idea dawned of enfolding their problem into something larger: the European Union. The United States and Iran have not gone to war but have a relationship of psychotic mistrust. The answer can only be the same: Broaden the context.
The revelation that Iran has built a second uranium enrichment plant in secrecy did not change the nuclear equation if that’s measured by the country’s ability to produce a bomb. No uranium has entered the facility. Iran’s eventual capacity to produce weapons-grade fissile material, let alone deliver it, is unaffected.
What has changed is the psychology of the Iranian nuclear program. Mistrust, already deep, is now fathomless.
With an enrichment facility at Natanz able to accommodate 54,000 centrifuges (just over 8,000 are installed), and its single nuclear power plant still in stop-go mode, there do not appear to be 54,000 reasons for Iran to burrow into a mountain near the holy city of Qum to install 3,000 more.
Tehran wants a military nuclear option even if it’s nervous — and hesitant — about the reality.
The Qum-nuclear twinning reveals the Iranian mindset: The enrichment program has attained sacred status as a symbol of Iranian independence — comparable to oil’s nationalization in the 1950s.
(Iran will argue its obligations to the International Atomic Energy Agency only required it to give notification of the new facility 180 days before introducing nuclear material. Western nations will contest that. The technicalities are debatable — and irrelevant. This is about trust betrayed by Tehran.)
The effect of Natanz-Qum was to make new sanctions more likely sooner. President Nicolas Sarkozy of France spoke of imposing them in December, absent an “in-depth change.” President Obama — who likes to leave hawkishness to Europeans — avoided the “s” word but did his best resolute thing.
More significant than the words, however, were the no-shows. Iran would have sat bolt upright had Obama been flanked by the leaders of Germany, Russia and China. Those three countries are principal sources of Iran’s trade.
Chancellor Angela Merkel could not find time (although she “associated” herself with Obama.) Russia expressed “serious concern.” China mumbled about “dialogue.” This was less a line in the sand than a faint squiggle.
I’ve said this before: Sanctions won’t work. Ray Takeyh, who worked on Iran with Dennis Ross at the State Department before losing his job last month and returning to the Council on Foreign Relations, told me that “sanctions are the feel-good option.”
Yes, it feels good to do something, but it doesn’t necessarily help. In this case, sanctions won’t for four reasons.
One: Iran is inured to sanctions after years of living with them and has in Dubai a sure-fire conduit for goods at a manageable surtax. Two: Russia and China will never pay more than lip-service to sanctions. Three: You don’t bring down a quasi-holy symbol — nuclear power — by cutting off gasoline sales. Four: sanctions feed the persecution complex on which the Iranian regime thrives.
A senior German Foreign Ministry official last week told an American Council on Germany delegation: “The efficiency of sanctions is not really discussed because if you do, you are left with only two options — a military strike or living with a nuclear Iran — and nobody wants to go there. So the answer is: Let’s impose further sanctions! It’s a dishonest debate.”
Dishonesty is a staple of Iran’s nuclear program. Tehran has dissembled. Israel, which introduced nuclear ambiguity in the region, has — repetitively — predicted an Iranian bomb is just a few years away since the early 1990s. It still is some years off in the view of U.S. intelligence.
The choice is indeed between a military strike and living with a nuclear Iran. But what is a “nuclear Iran?” Is it an Iran that’s nuclear-armed — a very dangerous development — or an Iran with an I.A.E.A,-monitored enrichment facility?
I believe monitored enrichment on Iranian soil in the name of what Obama called Iran’s “right to peaceful nuclear power” remains a possible basis for an agreement that blocks weaponization. Zero enrichment is by now a non-starter.
For fruitless sanctions to be avoided, the mantra of William Burns, the U.S. under secretary for political affairs who will attend multilateral talks with Iran starting Thursday, must be: “Widen the canvas.”
The Iranian regime is weak. Its disarray was again evident last week; it actually feels threatened by George Soros. Significant factions now view an American breakthrough as needed. They have a favorable view of Burns.
Burns must seek to open a parallel bilateral U.S.-Iran negotiation covering at least these areas: Afghanistan and Iraq (where interests often converge); Hezbollah and Hamas (where they do not); human rights; blocked Iranian assets; diplomatic relations; regional security arrangements; drugs; the fight against Al Qaeda; visas and travel.
Isolated, nuclear negotiations will fail. Integrated, they may not. Iran’s sense of humiliation is rooted in its America complex; its nuclear program is above all about the restoration of pride. Settle the complex to contain the program. Triangulate. Think broad. Think E.U., not Versailles.
And now here’s Prof. Krugman:
Every once in a while I feel despair over the fate of the planet. If you’ve been following climate science, you know what I mean: the sense that we’re hurtling toward catastrophe but nobody wants to hear about it or do anything to avert it.
And here’s the thing: I’m not engaging in hyperbole. These days, dire warnings aren’t the delusional raving of cranks. They’re what come out of the most widely respected climate models, devised by the leading researchers. The prognosis for the planet has gotten much, much worse in just the last few years.
What’s driving this new pessimism? Partly it’s the fact that some predicted changes, like a decline in Arctic Sea ice, are happening much faster than expected. Partly it’s growing evidence that feedback loops amplifying the effects of man-made greenhouse gas emissions are stronger than previously realized. For example, it has long been understood that global warming will cause the tundra to thaw, releasing carbon dioxide, which will cause even more warming, but new research shows far more carbon dioxide locked in the permafrost than previously thought, which means a much bigger feedback effect.
The result of all this is that climate scientists have, en masse, become Cassandras — gifted with the ability to prophesy future disasters, but cursed with the inability to get anyone to believe them.
And we’re not just talking about disasters in the distant future, either. The really big rise in global temperature probably won’t take place until the second half of this century, but there will be plenty of damage long before then.
For example, one 2007 paper in the journal Science is titled “Model Projections of an Imminent Transition to a More Arid Climate in Southwestern North America” — yes, “imminent” — and reports “a broad consensus among climate models” that a permanent drought, bringing Dust Bowl-type conditions, “will become the new climatology of the American Southwest within a time frame of years to decades.”
So if you live in, say, Los Angeles, and liked those pictures of red skies and choking dust in Sydney, Australia, last week, no need to travel. They’ll be coming your way in the not-too-distant future.
Now, at this point I have to make the obligatory disclaimer that no individual weather event can be attributed to global warming. The point, however, is that climate change will make events like that Australian dust storm much more common.
In a rational world, then, the looming climate disaster would be our dominant political and policy concern. But it manifestly isn’t. Why not?
Part of the answer is that it’s hard to keep peoples’ attention focused. Weather fluctuates — New Yorkers may recall the heat wave that pushed the thermometer above 90 in April — and even at a global level, this is enough to cause substantial year-to-year wobbles in average temperature. As a result, any year with record heat is normally followed by a number of cooler years: According to Britain’s Met Office, 1998 was the hottest year so far, although NASA — which arguably has better data — says it was 2005. And it’s all too easy to reach the false conclusion that the danger is past.
But the larger reason we’re ignoring climate change is that Al Gore was right: This truth is just too inconvenient. Responding to climate change with the vigor that the threat deserves would not, contrary to legend, be devastating for the economy as a whole. But it would shuffle the economic deck, hurting some powerful vested interests even as it created new economic opportunities. And the industries of the past have armies of lobbyists in place right now; the industries of the future don’t.
Nor is it just a matter of vested interests. It’s also a matter of vested ideas. For three decades the dominant political ideology in America has extolled private enterprise and denigrated government, but climate change is a problem that can only be addressed through government action. And rather than concede the limits of their philosophy, many on the right have chosen to deny that the problem exists.
So here we are, with the greatest challenge facing mankind on the back burner, at best, as a policy issue. I’m not, by the way, saying that the Obama administration was wrong to push health care first. It was necessary to show voters a tangible achievement before next November. But climate change legislation had better be next.
And as I pointed out in my last column, we can afford to do this. Even as climate modelers have been reaching consensus on the view that the threat is worse than we realized, economic modelers have been reaching consensus on the view that the costs of emission control are lower than many feared.
So the time for action is now. O.K., strictly speaking it’s long past. But better late than never.
