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Jimmy Carter's Spirit of Notre Dame

Grandpa — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 22:42:11 -0700

Jimmy Carter's Spirit of Notre Dame
By Jeffrey Lord

Notre Dame. May, 1977.
It was here that Jimmy Carter put his presidency on the path of losing one to the Gipper.

In the midst of the controversy over the decision by Notre Dame to invite President Obama to deliver the school's commencement address, it's worth a look back at a similar Notre Dame appearance by an earlier and politically like-minded predecessor. Today the controversy about the school's invitation to Obama revolves around Obama's pro-abortion politics and the appropriateness of being honored by the famously Catholic, which is to say pro-life, university. In Carter's case, the controversy arose not ahead of time but as a result of his remarks, and the subject of controversy had nothing to do with abortion, which Carter never mentioned.

In May of 1977, Carter was just over four months into his presidency. He was very much the popular new president. His initial popularity still holds the record for newly installed presidents, with Gallup scoring him at an impressive 71%. In comparison, President Obama at a similar point scored a 68%. Thus the controversy Carter stirred by his Notre Dame commencement address was notable, since in retrospect it put Carter on a glide path to one of the most unsuccessful presidencies in modern times, ending in his landslide defeat by Ronald Reagan four years later. (Ironically, Reagan won his nickname "The Gipper" with his film portrayal of dying Notre Dame football star George Gipp.)

Perhaps more importantly than Carter's personal political fate the speech signaled his decision to abandon his party's identification with the policies of military strength and American exceptionalism championed by Democrats from FDR to JFK and LBJ. Instead, Carter chose to move the country towards the more left-leaning foreign and defense policies advocated by 1972 nominee Senator George McGovern. The results were decidedly not approved of by the American public. On the day of Carter's departure from the White House Gallup recorded his popularity had nose-dived to 34%, putting him just ahead of predecessor Harry Truman at the low-point of the Korean War (32%) and a mere ten points higher than the resigned Richard Nixon, at 24%. By contrast, even the unpopular LBJ had left with a 49% rating, and Gerald Ford, the incumbent Carter had defeated, departed with a 53% approval number.

So what did Carter say at Notre Dame, where he was invited by the university's president, the Reverend Theodore Hesburgh? What signal did he send that wound up getting him, the country and the entire world in such trouble over the next four years and well beyond that? More to the point, how does it compare with the direction already being signaled by President Obama as he approaches his own already controversial appearance at Notre Dame?
The most notable single sentence in Carter's Notre Dame speech was this one:

We are now free of that inordinate fear of Communism which once led us to embrace any dictator who joined us in our fear.
Carter went on to insist that it was time to govern with a "wider framework of international cooperation" because "the world today is in the midst of the most profound and rapid transformation in its entire history."

He also added this about the American approach to the Soviet Union in the Carter era: "Our goal is to be fair to both sides, to produce reciprocal stability, parity, and security." In other words, in Carter's view, a view widely held among leftward-leaning elites, both the United States and the Soviet Union had genuinely competing claims. They were morally equal to each other.
The speech was the lead story in the news the next day. By the time Carter left the White House after four years of promoting moral equivalence, the world was in murderous chaos. The unintended consequences of Carter's policies as enunciated at Notre Dame were both considerable and long lasting. Some would argue they are reverberating right up until today. The Soviets, seeing Carter as weak, invaded Afghanistan, with Carter famously "shocked" that he had been lied to over the issue by then Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. The Soviet invasion in turn drew into Muslim-dominated Afghanistan a young Saudi named Osama bin Laden determined to fight a jihad against non-Muslims. There Bin Laden met a number of similarly enraged young Islamicists from throughout the Middle East, all determined to conduct a jihad against the invaders. As noted in Lawrence Wright's Pulitzer Prize winning book The Looming Tower, this is where the stirrings began that eventually produced the Taliban and a group called al Qaeda, with bin Laden himself headquartering in Afghanistan. In Nicaragua the Communist Sandinistas overthrew the Somoza dictatorship on Carter's watch and promptly imposed their own, giving both Cuban and Soviet "advisors" a free hand to use the country as a staging ground for violence in Central America that would last a decade. In Iran, the Shah was overturned by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, turning a one-time American ally into the implacable foe now calling itself the Islamic Republic of Iran. Carter, abandoning the Shah, stretched his hand out to Khomeini at first, viewing him as a fellow man of faith rather than the world's first prominent Islamic terrorist. Said Carter's U.N. Ambassador Andrew Young: "Khomeini will eventually be hailed as a saint."

He wasn't.

If this approach of Carter's sounds vaguely familiar these days, it should. Carter's words at Notre Dame bear a striking resemblance to the substance if not the actual words of President Obama.

Here's Carter, at Notre Dame, insisting America had abandoned its values in our foreign policy under his predecessors (Ford, Nixon and LBJ) and that he would restore them

For too many years, we've been willing to adopt the flawed and erroneous principles and tactics of our adversaries, sometimes abandoning our own values for theirs. We've fought fire with fire, never thinking that fire is better quenched with water.

And Obama, before a joint session of Congress, saying the same of America today and blaming Bush:

To overcome extremism, we must also be vigilant in upholding the values our troops defend -- because there is no force in the world more powerful than the example of America. That is why I have ordered the closing of the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, and will seek swift and certain justice for captured terrorists -- because living our values doesn't make us weaker, it makes us safer and it makes us stronger.

Carter sought to appease the rise of anti-Americanism abroad that surfaced as a result of a U.S. challenge to an enemy. In the case of Carter, the idea was to soothe ruffled European allies and others over U.S. Vietnam policy and opposition to Communism. For Obama, the point is to soothe European allies and their opposition to the Bush War on Terror against Islamic fascism.

Carter at Notre Dame:

The Vietnamese war produced a profound moral crisis, sapping worldwide faith in our own policy and our system of life, a crisis of confidence made even more grave by the covert pessimism of some of our leaders.

Obama at Camp Lejeune:

And we have learned the importance of working closely with friends and allies, which is why we are launching a new era of engagement in the world.

Or, again, it can be the idea of offering an olive branch to an enemy, telling the world Americans have nothing to fear from that potential enemy, and that potential enemy has nothing to fear from America.

Carter at Notre Dame:

We are now free of that inordinate fear of Communism which once led us to embrace any dictator who joined us in our fear.
Obama in Inaugural Address:

To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect.
Obama has even gone out of his way to make this point to today's most prominent American enemy, signaling his intentions to Islamic radicals sworn to destroy not only America but Western civilization. Instead of a speech, Obama exercised a technical option not available to Carter in 1977: taping a video message for the Iranian mullahs proclaiming America's peaceful intentions for distribution on You Tube. Speaking in the Carteresque language of moral equivalence Carter had used to appeal to the Soviet Communists, President Obama looked into the camera lens to assert "the United States wants the Islamic Republic of Iran to take its rightful place in the community of nations." This is the Obama version of Carter's assurance to the Soviets as expressed at Notre Dame: "Our goal is to be fair to both sides, to produce reciprocal stability, parity, and security." In other words, there's really no big deal about the differences between the United States and the Soviet Union (Carter's view) or between the United States and Iran (Obama's view). Carter, unlike Reagan, saw no "evil empire." His objective was not to win the Cold War but to get along. Obama never blinks at the reality of Iran, whether it is its lust for nuclear weapons or internal policies where women are stoned for adultery and gays executed simply for the "crime" of being gay.

Obama specifically made it clear in his video that his administration was not threatening the Iranians nor would he seek a change in their government over their efforts to build a nuclear weapon that presumably would be used to destroy Israel. Said former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Martin S. Indyk (author of Innocent Abroad: An Intimate Account of American Diplomacy in the Middle East) of this approach: "That wording is designed to demonstrate acceptance of the government of Iran….The message is dripping with sincerity and directly addresses one of the things they [the Iranian government] are most concerned about." Which is to say, the Iranians want the ability to be left alone to build their bomb when they aren't stoning women or executing gays, all of which the President of the United States telegraphs he is willing to ignore in the name of bringing Iran into "its rightful place in the community of nations." As Carter wanted to get along with the Soviet Union, Obama seeks to get along with the Islamic extremists. Victory is never the goal.

In the last few days, Obama has revealed his new strategy for the U.S. to the world. In a bow to political correctness and in a nod to Carter's philosophy as expressed at Notre Dame, the Obama administration announced it will no longer use the term "terrorism." Instead, according to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, the government will be changing it instead to "man-caused disasters." Nor will the term "enemy combatants" be used, because, according to Attorney General Eric Holder, the term is not compatible with American "values." Next the Obama team had the Pentagon issue an internal memorandum saying "this administration prefers to avoid using the term 'Long War' or 'Global War on Terror' [GWOT]. Please use 'Overseas Contingency Operation.'"

Once the new terminology was squared away and duly communicated to a watching world, the administration wrapped up its internal debate about its strategy for the war in Afghanistan. In a blink the behind-the-scenes discussions were on the front page of the New York Times. Predictably, Vice President Biden -- who had insisted the surge in Iraq would not work -- was warning of a "political and military quagmire" ahead in Afghanistan, according to the Times. The final (for now) decision is a lesser variation on the Iraq surge, targeting al Qaeda by sending an additional 4,000 troops -- yet forbidding them from participating in combat. Rather, the objective will be to train the Afghan army and national police. In other spheres of U.S. foreign policy, Obama has told the Russians he wishes to "reset" the U.S.-Russian relationship, in part by standing down on the deployment of U.S. missiles in Poland in return for assistance on Iran, sent his envoys to Syria (where the Bush administration had reportedly sent U.S. warplanes to destroy a partly constructed nuclear reactor), invited Iran to a conference on the future of Afghanistan and indicated the U.S. is prepared to talk with the Taliban. Only days ago Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was on Fox appealing to the North Koreans to talk to the administration.

"Words matter," President Obama is fond of saying, and so they do. Jimmy Carter's words at Notre Dame in fact mattered a great deal, as did the actions that flowed from those words. As the date draws near for the Obama appearance at Notre Dame, it is a useful reminder that this same occasion 32 years ago became the stage on which the words of Jimmy Carter set the Carter presidency, America and the world on a fateful course. The world -- which very much included the Soviets, the Iranian mullahs and the Nicaraguan Communist guerillas among many others -- was watching and listening.
The results included the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the establishment of a Soviet and Cuban base of operations in Central America, the establishment of an Islamic Republic in Iran, the taking of American hostages in Iran, the mass murder by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and finally the wreckage of Carter's presidency. (And that doesn't even count the crippling of the US economy with double-digit inflation, interest rates and unemployment.) Perhaps most disturbingly, the Carter era as represented by Carter himself in his Notre Dame speech would eventually set in motion the creation of Al Qaeda and the Islamic terrorist zeitgeist that has engulfed the world ever since.

A bare two-plus months into the Obama era it appears the new president is guiding his administration and the country almost precisely along the same path of moral equivalence Carter began to tread at Notre Dame. Sending the entire world a message outlining the spirit in which President Obama intends to govern. Unintended consequences be damned.
You might call it Jimmy Carter's Spirit of Notre Dame.

Hatshepsut, the Queen that ruled Egypt as a man

Shiloh Jolie Pitt — Tue, 05 May 2009 12:56:17 -0700

Source: National Geographic magazine

Visit the National Geographic Photo Gallery to see the amazing images that accompanied this article.

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The King Herself
What motivated Hatshepsut to rule ancient Egypt as a man while her stepson stood in the shadows? Her mummy, and her true story, have come to light.

By Chip Brown

There was something strangely touching about her fingertips. Everywhere else about her person all human grace had vanished. The raveled linen around her neck looked like a fashion statement gone horribly awry. Her mouth, with the upper lip shelved over the lower, was a gruesome crimp. (She came from a famous lineage of overbites.) Her eye sockets were packed with blind black resin, her nostrils unbecomingly plugged with tight rolls of cloth. Her left ear had sunk into the flesh on the side of her skull, and her head was almost completely without hair.

I leaned toward the open display case in Cairo's Egyptian Museum and gazed at what in all likelihood is the body of the female pharaoh Hatshepsut, the extraordinary woman who ruled Egypt from 1479 to 1458 B.C. and is famous today less for her reign during the golden age of Egypt's 18th dynasty than for having the audacity to portray herself as a man. There was no beguiling myrrh perfume in the air, only some sharp and sour smell that seemed minted during the many centuries she had spent in a limestone cave. It was hard to square this prostrate thing with the great ruler who lived so long ago and of whom it was written, "To look upon her was more beautiful than anything." The only human touch was in the bone shine of her nailless fingertips where the mummified flesh had shrunk back, creating the illusion of a manicure and evoking not just our primordial vanity but our tenuous intimacies, our brief and passing feel for the world.

The discovery of Hatshepsut's lost mummy made headlines two summers ago, but the full story unfolded slowly, in increments, a forensic drama more along the lines of CSI than Raiders of the Lost Ark. Indeed the search for Hatshepsut showed the extent to which the trowels and brushes of archaeology's traditional toolbox have been supplemented by CT scanners and DNA gradient thermocyclers.

In 1903 the renowned archaeologist Howard Carter had found Hatshepsut's sarcophagus in the 20th tomb discovered in the Valley of the Kings-KV20. The sarcophagus, one of three Hatshepsut had prepared, was empty. Scholars did not know where her mummy was or whether it had even survived the campaign to eradicate the record of her rule during the reign of her co-regent and ultimate successor, Thutmose III, when almost all the images of her as king were systematically chiseled off temples, monuments, and obelisks. The search that seems to have finally solved the mystery was launched in 2005 by Zahi Hawass, head of the Egyptian Mummy Project and secretary general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities. Hawass and a team of scientists zeroed in on a mummy they called KV60a, which had been discovered more than a century earlier but wasn't thought significant enough to remove from the floor of a minor tomb in the Valley of the Kings. KV60a had been cruising eternity without even the hospitality of a coffin, much less a retinue of figurines to perform royal chores. She had nothing to wear, either-no headdress, no jewelry, no gold sandals or gold toe and finger coverings, none of the treasures that had been provided the pharaoh Tutankhamun, who was a pip-squeak of a king compared with Hatshepsut.

And even with all the high-tech methods used to crack one of Egypt's most notable missing person cases, if it had not been for the serendipitous discovery of a tooth, KV60a might still be lying alone in the dark, her royal name and status unacknowledged. Today she is enshrined in one of the two Royal Mummy Rooms at the Egyptian Museum, with plaques in Arabic and English proclaiming her to be Hatshepsut, the King Herself, reunited at long last with her extended family of fellow New Kingdom pharaohs.

Given the oblivion that befell Hatshepsut, it's hard to think of a pharaoh whose hopes of being remembered are more poignant. She seems to have been more afraid of anonymity than of death. She was one of the greatest builders in one of the greatest Egyptian dynasties. She raised and renovated temples and shrines from the Sinai to Nubia. The four granite obelisks she erected at the vast temple of the great god Amun at Karnak were among the most magnificent ever constructed. She commissioned hundreds of statues of herself and left accounts in stone of her lineage, her titles, her history, both real and concocted, even her thoughts and hopes, which at times she confided with uncommon candor. Expressions of worry Hatshepsut inscribed on one of her obelisks at Karnak still resonate with an almost charming insecurity: "Now my heart turns this way and that, as I think what the people will say. Those who see my monuments in years to come, and who shall speak of what I have done."

Many uncertainties plague the early history of the New Kingdom, but it's clear that when Hatshepsut was born, Egyptian power was waxing. Her possible grandfather Ahmose, founder of the 18th dynasty, had driven out the formidable Hyksos invaders who had occupied the northern part of the Nile Valley for two centuries. When Ahmose's son Amenhotep I did not produce a son who lived to succeed him, a redoubtable general known as Thutmose is believed to have been brought into the royal line since he had married a princess.

Hatshepsut was the oldest daughter of Thutmose and his Great Royal Wife, Queen Ahmose, likely a close relative of King Ahmose. But Thutmose also had a son by another queen, and this son, Thutmose II, inherited the crown when his father "rested from life." Adhering to a common method of fortifying the royal lineage-and with none of our modern-day qualms about sleeping with your sister-Thutmose II and Hatshepsut married. They produced one daughter; a minor wife, Isis, would give Thutmose the male heir that Hatshepsut was unable to provide.

Thutmose II did not rule for long, and when he was ushered into the afterlife by what CT scans 3,500 years later would suggest was heart disease, his heir, Thutmose III, was still a young boy. In time-honored fashion, Hatshepsut assumed effective control as the young pharaoh's queen regent.

So began one of the most intriguing periods of ancient Egyptian history.

At first, Hatshepsut acted on her stepson's behalf, careful to respect the conventions under which previous queens had handled political affairs while juvenile offspring learned the ropes. But before long, signs emerged that Hatshepsut's regency would be different. Early reliefs show her performing kingly functions such as making offerings to the gods and ordering up obelisks from red granite quarries at Aswan. After just a few years she had assumed the role of "king" of Egypt, supreme power in the land. Her stepson-who by then may have been fully capable of assuming the throne-was relegated to second-in-command. Hatshepsut proceeded to rule for a total of 21 years.

What induced Hatshepsut to break so radically with the traditional role of queen regent? A social or military crisis? Dynastic politics? Divine injunctions from Amun? A thirst for power? "There was something impelling Hatshepsut to change the way she portrayed herself on public monuments, but we don't know what it is," says Peter Dorman, a noted Egyptologist and president of the American University of Beirut. "One of the hardest things to guess is her motive."

Bloodlines may have had something to do with it. On a cenotaph at the sandstone quarries of Gebel el Silsila, her chief steward and architect Senenmut refers to her as "the king's firstborn daughter," a distinction that accents her lineage as the senior heir of Thutmose I rather than as the chief royal wife of Thutmose II. Remember, Hatshepsut was a true blue blood, related to the pharaoh Ahmose, while her husband-brother was the offspring of an adopted king. The Egyptians believed in the divinity of the pharaoh; only Hatshepsut, not her stepson, had a biological link to divine royalty.

Still, there was the small matter of gender. The kingship was meant to be passed down from father to son, not daughter; religious belief dictated that the king's role could not be adequately carried out by a woman. Getting over this hurdle must have taken great shrewdness from the female king. When her husband died, Hatshepsut's preferred title was not King's Wife, but God's Wife of Amun, a designation some believe paved her way to the throne.

Hatshepsut never made a secret of her sex in texts; her inscriptions frequently employed feminine endings. But in the early going, she seemed to be looking for ways to synthesize the images of queen and king, as if a visual compromise might resolve the paradox of a female sovereign. In one seated red granite statue, Hatshepsut is shown with the unmistakable body of a woman but with the striped nemes headdress and uraeus cobra, symbols of a king. In some temple reliefs, Hatshepsut is dressed in a traditional restrictive ankle-length gown but with her feet wide apart in the striding pose of the king.

As the years went on, she seems to have decided it was easier to sidestep the issue of gender altogether. She had herself depicted solely as a male king, in the pharaoh's headdress, the pharaoh's shendyt kilt, and the pharaoh's false beard-without any female traits. Many of her statues, images, and texts seem part of a carefully calibrated media campaign to bolster the legitimacy of her reign as king-and rationalize her transgression. In reliefs at Hatshepsut's mortuary temple, she spun a fable of her accession as the fulfillment of a divine plan and declared that her father, Thutmose I, not only intended her to be king but also was able to attend her coronation. In the panels the great god Amun is shown appearing before Hatshepsut's mother disguised as Thutmose I. He commands Khnum, the ram-headed god of creation who models the clay of mankind on his potter's wheel: "Go, to fashion her better than all gods; shape for me, this my daughter, whom I have begotten."

Unlike most contractors, Khnum gets right to work, replying: "Her form shall be more exalted than the gods, in her great dignity of King. …"

On Khnum's potter's wheel, little Hatshepsut is depicted unmistakably as a boy.

Exactly who was the intended audience for such propaganda is still disputed. It's hard to imagine Hatshepsut needed to shore up her legitimacy with powerful allies like the high priests of Amun or members of the elite such as Senenmut. Who, then, was she pitching her story to? The gods? The future? National Geographic?

One answer may be found in Hatshepsut's references to the lapwing, a common Nile marsh bird known to ancient Egyptians as rekhyt. In hieroglyphic texts the word "rekhyt" is usually translated as "the common people." It occurs frequently in New Kingdom inscriptions, but a few years ago Kenneth Griffin, now at Swansea University in Wales, noticed that Hatshepsut made greater use of the phrase than other 18th-dynasty pharaohs. "Her inscriptions seemed to show a personal association with the rekhyt which at this stage is unrivaled," he says. Hatshepsut often spoke possessively of "my rekhyt" and asked for the approval of the rekhyt-as if the unusual ruler were a closet populist. When Hatshepsut's heart flutters this way and that as she wonders what "the people" will say, the people she may have had in mind were the ones as common as lapwings on the Nile, the rekhyt.

After her death, around 1458 B.C., her stepson went on to secure his destiny as one of the great pharaohs in Egyptian history. Thutmose III was a monument maker like his stepmother but also a warrior without peer, the so-called Napoleon of ancient Egypt. In a 19-year span he led 17 military campaigns in the Levant, including a victory against the Canaanites at Megiddo in present-day Israel that is still taught in military academies. He had a flock of wives, one of whom bore his successor, Amenhotep II. Thutmose III also found time to introduce the chicken to the Egyptian dinner table.

In the latter part of his life, when other men might be content to reminisce about bygone adventures, Thutmose III appears to have taken up another pastime. He decided to methodically wipe his stepmother, the king, out of history.

When Zahi Hawass set out to find Her Majesty King Hatshepsut, he was fairly certain of one thing: The naked mummy found resting on the floor of a minor tomb was not her. "When I started searching for Hatshepsut, I never thought I would discover that she was this mummy," Hawass says. For starters, she had no apparent regal bearing; she was fat, and as Hawass wrote in an article published in the journal KMT, she had "huge pendulous breasts" of the sort more likely to be found on Hatshepsut's wet nurse.

Months earlier Hawass had visited Hatshepsut's tomb, KV20, to search for clues to her whereabouts. Wearing his trademark fedora, Hawass lowered himself 700 feet into one of the most dangerous tombs in the Valley of the Kings. The tunnel through friable shale and limestone reeked of bat droppings. When Howard Carter cleared it in 1903, he called it "one of the most irksome pieces of work I ever supervised." In the tomb Carter found two sarcophagi bearing Hatshepsut's name, some limestone wall panels, and a canopic chest, but no mummy.

Carter made another discovery in a tomb close by-tomb KV60, a minor structure whose entrance was cut into the corridor entrance of KV19. In KV60 Carter found "two much denuded mummies of women and some mummified geese." One mummy was in a coffin, the other on the floor. Carter took the geese and closed the tomb. Three years later another archaeologist removed the mummy in the coffin to the Egyptian Museum. The inscription on the coffin was later linked to Hatshepsut's nurse. The mummy on the floor was left as she was, as she had been since being stashed there, probably by priests during the reburials of the 21st dynasty, around 1000 B.C.

Over the years Egyptologists lost track of the entrance to KV60, and the mummy on the tomb floor effectively disappeared. That changed in June 1989, when Donald Ryan, an Egyptologist and lecturer at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington, came to explore several small, undecorated tombs in the valley. Prompted by the influential Egyptologist Elizabeth Thomas, who suspected that KV60 might house Hatshepsut's mummy, Ryan had included it on his application for a research permit. Arriving too late his first day to start work, Ryan decided to stroll around the site to drop off some tools. He wandered over to the entrance of KV19 and for the heck of it, thinking KV60 might be nearby, started sweeping the entranceway with his broom. He worked backward from the door of KV19. Within half an hour he'd found a crack in the rock corridor. A stone hatch revealed a set of stairs. A week later, with Beethoven's Pathétique Sonata playing on a tape deck, he and a local antiquities inspector entered the "lost" tomb.

"It was spooky," he recalls. "I had never found a mummy before. The inspector and I walked in very carefully. There was a woman lying on the floor. Oh my gosh!"

The mummy was lying in a tomb that had been trashed in ancient times by robbers. Her left arm was crooked across her chest in a burial pose some believe to be common to 18th-dynasty Egyptian queens. Ryan set about cataloging what he found. "We found the smashed-up face piece of a coffin and flecks of gold that had been scraped off," he recalls. "We didn't know how much had been moved around by Howard Carter, so we documented it as an intact site." In a side chamber Ryan found a huge pile of wrappings, a mummified cow's leg, and a stacked pile of "victual mummies," wrapped bundles of food laid up for the deceased's long journey through eternity.

The more Ryan studied the mummy, the more he thought she might be someone important. "She was extraordinarily well mummified," he says. "And she was striking a royal pose. I thought, Why, she's a queen! Could it be Hatshepsut? Possibly. But there was nothing to link the mummy to any specific individual."

Still, it didn't seem right to leave whoever she was lying naked on the floor in a mess of rags. Before he closed the tomb, Ryan and a colleague tidied the burial chamber up a bit. At a local carpenter's shop they had a simple coffin built. They lowered the unknown lady into her new bed and closed the lid. Hatshepsut's prolonged period of anonymity was nearing its end.

Historians long cast Hatshepsut in the role of evil stepmother to the young Thutmose III. The evidence of her supposed cruelty was the payback she posthumously received when her stepson had her monuments attacked and her kingly name erased from public memorials. Indeed, Thutmose III did as thorough a job smiting the iconography of King Hatshepsut as he had whacking the Canaanites at Megiddo. At Karnak her image and cartouche, or name symbol, were chiseled off shrine walls; the texts on her obelisks were covered with stone (which had the unintended effect of keeping them in pristine condition).

At Deir el Bahri, the site of her most spectacular architectural achievement, her statues were smashed and thrown into a pit in front of her mortuary temple. Known as Djeser Djeseru, holy of holies, on the west bank of the Nile across from modern Luxor, the temple is set against a bay of lion-colored cliffs that frame the tawny temple stones the way the nemes frames a pharaoh's face. With its three tiers, its porticoes, its spacious ramp-linked terraces, its now vanished sphinx-lined causeway and T-shaped papyrus pools and shade-casting myrrh trees, Djeser Djeseru is among the most glorious temples ever built. It was designed (perhaps by Senenmut) to be the center of Hatshepsut's cult.

Images of her as queen were left undisturbed, but wherever she had proclaimed herself king, the workers of her stepson followed with their chisels, the vandalism careful and precise. "The destruction was not an emotional decision; it was a political decision," says Zbigniew Szafrański, the director of the Polish archaeological mission to Egypt that has been working at Hatshepsut's mortuary temple since 1961.

By the time excavators cleared the debris from the mostly buried temple in the late 1890s, the mystery of Hatshepsut had been refined: What kind of ruler was she? The answer seemed self-evident to a number of Egyptologists quick to embrace the idea that Thutmose III had attacked Hatshepsut's memory as revenge for her shameless usurpation of his royal power. William C. Hayes, the curator of Egyptian art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a principal at the Deir el Bahri excavations in the 1920s and '30s, wrote in 1953: "It was not long … before this vain, ambitious, and unscrupulous woman showed herself in her true colors."

When archaeologists discovered evidence in the 1960s indicating that the banishment of King Hatshepsut had begun at least 20 years after her death, the soap opera of a hotheaded stepson wreaking vengeance on his unscrupulous stepmother fell apart. A more logical scenario was devised around the possibility that Thutmose III needed to reinforce the legitimacy of his son Amenhotep II's succession in the face of rival claims from other family members. And Hatshepsut, once disparaged for ruthless ambition, is now admired for her political skill.

"Nobody can know what she was like," says Catharine Roehrig, now a curator in the same department once headed by Hayes. "She ruled for 20 years because she was capable of making things work. I believe she was very canny and that she knew how to play one person off against the next-without murdering them or getting murdered herself."

Close to two decades after Donald Ryan rediscovered the location of KV60, Zahi Hawass asked the curators at the Egyptian Museum to round up all the unidentified and possibly royal female mummies from the 18th dynasty, including the two bodies-one thin, one fat-that had been found in KV60. The thin mummy was retrieved from storage in the museum's attic; the fat one, KV60a, which had remained in the tomb where it had been found, was transported from the Valley of the Kings. Over a four-month period in late 2006 and early 2007, the mummies passed through a CT scanner that enabled the archaeologists to examine them in detail and to gauge their age and cause of death.

The CT results from the four candidate mummies were inconclusive. Then Hawass had another idea. A wooden box engraved with Hatshepsut's cartouche had been found in a great cache of royal mummies at Deir el Bahri in 1881; it was believed to contain her liver. When the box was run through the scanner, the researchers were astonished to detect a tooth. The team dentist identified it as a secondary molar with part of its root missing. When Ashraf Selim, professor of radiology at Cairo University, reexamined the jaw images of the four mummies, there in the right upper jaw of the fat mummy from KV60 was a root with no tooth. "I measured the root in the mummy and the tooth, and we found that they both matched," Selim says.

To be sure, the scientists have proved only that a tooth in a box belongs to a mummy. The identification is based on the assumption that the contents of the box are properly labeled and were once vital parts of the famous female pharaoh. And the box inscribed with Hatshepsut's cartouche is not the typical canopic vessel in which mummified organs are found. It's made of wood, not stone, and might have been used to hold jewelry or oils or small valuables.

"Some would say we have not found absolute proof," Selim says. "And I would agree."

Still, Hawass asks, what are the odds that a box identified with Hatshepsut and found in a cache of royal mummies contains a tooth that exactly matches a hole in the smile of a mummy found next to the beloved nurse of Egypt's great female pharaoh? And how marvelous that the tooth was there to connect Hatshepsut's cartouche with a mummy. "If the embalmer hadn't picked it up and put it in with the liver, there is no way we would have known what happened to Hatshepsut," Hawass says.

Already the CT scans have changed history, dispelling theories that Hatshepsut might have been killed by her stepson. She probably died of an infection caused by an abscessed tooth, with complications from advanced bone cancer and possibly diabetes. Hawass speculates that the high priests of Amun may have moved her body to the tomb of her nurse to protect it from looters; many royalty of the New Kingdom were hidden in secret tombs for security. As for the DNA tests, the first round began in April 2007 and has shown nothing definitive.

"With ancient specimens you never have a 100 percent match, because the genetic sequences aren't complete," says Angélique Corthals, a professor of biomedicine and forensic studies at Stony Brook University in New York and one of three consultants working with the Egyptians. "We looked at mitochondrial DNA for the suspected Hatshepsut mummy and her grandmother Ahmose Nefertari. There is about a 30 to 35 percent chance that the two samples are not related, but I cannot emphasize enough that these are just preliminary results." Another round of tests may soon deliver a clearer verdict.

Last spring photographer Kenneth Garrett asked Wafaa El Saddik, director of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, to review a list of Hatshepsut treasures he hoped to photograph for this article: a limestone sphinx of Hatshepsut from the ruins of her temple, the wooden box containing the tooth, a limestone bust of Hatshepsut in the guise of the underworld god Osiris. El Saddik came to the final item on the list: the mummified body of Hatshepsut herself. "You want us to remove the glass?" she asked incredulously, as if the mummy, long neglected, now possessed something unspeakably precious. The photographer nodded. The director shuddered. "This is the history of the world we're talking about!" she exclaimed.

In the end, it was decreed that one of the panels of glass could be removed from the case in the Royal Mummy Room without jeopardizing the history of the world. Staring at what was left of the great female pharaoh as the lights were being set up, I found myself wondering why it was so important to authenticate her corpse. On the one hand, what could better animate the astonishing history of ancient Egypt than the actual woman preserved in defiance of nature and the forces of decay? Here she was now, among us, like an ambassador of antiquity.

On the other hand, what did we want from her? Wasn't there something oppressively morbid about the curiosity that brought millions of rubberneckers to the Royal Mummy Rooms and made a fetish of the royal dead in the first place? The longer I stared at Hatshepsut, the more I recoiled from those unfathomable eyes and the suffocating fixity of that lifeless flesh. Most of us live by the lapwing creed that is the antithesis of the pharaohs' faith: ashes to ashes, dust to dust. It struck me how much more of Hatshepsut was alive in her texts, where even after so many thousands of years, you can still feel the flutter of her heart.

________

Source: National Geographic magazine

Pdaphone Comparison

aeptreee — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 12:21:37 -0700

The Anti-Reagan

Eleuthera — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 12:27:06 -0700

by Patrick J. Buchanan
06/09/2009

Despite his boldness, Barack Obama seems as fated to fail as were Woodrow Wilson and Jimmy Carter. And for the same reason: a belief in his own righteousness and moral superiority, and a belief that his ideals and his persona count mightily in the modern world.

Wilson declaimed about America's fight to "make the world safe for democracy" when in harness with the British, French, Russian, Japanese and Italian empires, all slavering to feast on the carcasses of the Hohenzollern, Habsburg and Ottoman empires.

By 1920, Wilson was a tragic failure, mocked by ex-allies and reviled by former enemies for having dishonored his own 14 Points.

Jimmy Carter declared in 1977 that "we have gotten over our inordinate fear of communism that caused us to embrace any dictator who shared in that fear." So, we undermined Nicaragua's Anastasio Somoza and the Shah, and got the Sandinistas and the Ayatollah Khomeini.

As for Barack, he behaves on the world stage like some Ivy League kid ashamed of the people he came from, letting one and all on campus know that he is nothing like his benighted family with its sordid history.

In Cairo, he confessed that America had a hand in dumping over the regime in Iran in 1953. He did not mention that the United States forced the retreat of Joseph Stalin's army from Iran in 1946.

For the 100th time, he declared, "I have unequivocally prohibited the use of torture by the United States, and I have ordered the prison at Guantanamo Bay closed by early next year."

Is Obama unaware that Egypt, Turkey and Saudi Arabia run prisons that make Guantanamo look like The Breakers at Palm Beach?

How many Guantanamo inmates plead to be sent home to Muslim countries?

In Trinidad, Obama sat for 55 minutes enduring Daniel Ortega's diatribe against the United States for mistreatment of Castro's Cuba and for the Bay of Pigs. Obama protested that he could not be held responsible for something that happened the year he was born.

Why could not he say to Ortega: "We also intervened in the Dominican Republic in 1965 to block a communist takeover, and in Grenada in 1983. The only problem with the Bay of Pigs is that we should have done it right and removed the odious Cuban dictatorship, and put Fidel, Raul and Che up against that same wall where so many patriots perished and spared the Cuban people 50 years of tyranny and the prostitution of their island into a base camp for the greatest despotism of the 20th century."

What is the matter with Obama that he cannot defend our Cold War conduct and Cold War presidents like Ike and JFK?

Answer: Obama cannot, because at heart he buys into the anti-American narrative that ours is a deplorable history -- of genocide against the Indians, of slavery and segregation, of robbing Mexicans of their land and of disrespecting our Latin neighbors.

Obama is determined to make the requisite apologies to show the world he does not condone the sins our fathers committed.

Thus, as Nile Gardiner of the Heritage Foundation has cataloged, Obama has apologized to Europe for our having "shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive." He apologized to Latin America for our having been "disengaged and at times ... sought to dictate."

He told the Turks that we are "working through our own darker periods in our history. ... Our nation still struggles with the legacy of slavery and segregation, the past treatment of Native Americans."

Obama, however, did not ask the Turks to confess to their own "darker periods," which might have taken some time.

Obama is the anti-Reagan. Where Reagan ever spoke of the greatness and glory of America, her history and heroes, her capacity to make the world all over again, Obama is like a dismal parson, forever reminding us -- and everyone within earshot -- of our own and our fathers' sins.

Obama is not only demoralizing Middle America, he is driving away the God-and-country patriots who are sick of hearing this rot from professors and journalists, and prefer not to hear it from their president. He is ceding moral high ground to regimes and nations that do not deserve it.

If Obama believes he can build himself up by tearing America down, he is mistaken. Cynical foreigners will view it with snickering contempt, patriotic Americans with disgust. What kind of leader is it who talks down his own country on foreign soil?

America's performance in the Cold War was hardly flawless. But does anyone deny that we were on the right side, that the Soviet Empire and Mao's China and communist Vietnam and Castro's Cuba were on the side of tyranny -- and that the neutrals were by and large irrelevant or worse in that great cause?

A nation is an extended family. While families fight and quarrel, often bitterly, you do not take the family quarrel outside the family.

You don't hang the family's dirty linen on the communal clothesline.

Obama, however -- like some Hollywood actress seeking sympathy and public approbation with her tell-all biography detailing how she was abused by her father -- trolls for popularity with America's adversaries by reciting for the benefit of the world all the sins his country has allegedly committed.

When did this become the duty of the president of the United States?

The Cheney Fallacy

Eleuthera — Sun, 24 May 2009 12:30:37 -0700

Jack Goldsmith, The New Republic Published: Monday, May 18, 2009
Why Barack Obama is waging a more effective war on terror than George W. Bush.

Former Vice President Cheney says that President Obama's reversal of Bush-era terrorism policies endangers American security. The Obama administration, he charges, has "moved to take down a lot of those policies we put in place that kept the nation safe for nearly eight years from a follow-on terrorist attack like 9/11." Many people think Cheney is scare-mongering and owes President Obama his support or at least his silence. But there is a different problem with Cheney's criticisms: his premise that the Obama administration has reversed Bush-era policies is largely wrong. The truth is closer to the opposite: The new administration has copied most of the Bush program, has expanded some of it, and has narrowed only a bit. Almost all of the Obama changes have been at the level of packaging, argumentation, symbol, and rhetoric. This does not mean that the Obama changes are unimportant. Packaging, argumentation, symbol, and rhetoric, it turns out, are vitally important to the legitimacy of terrorism policies.

The Bush approach to counterterrorism policy included eleven essential elements. Here is the Obama position to date on each.
1. War v. Crime
A bedrock Bush principle was that the threat posed by al Qaeda and its affiliates required the president to assert military war powers. The legality of controversial policies like military detention, military commissions, and targeted killings depends in the first instance on the United States being in a state of war. Many Obama supporters and most allies sharply disagree with the war characterization, and maintain that the criminal justice system--arrest, extradition, civilian trials, and the like--suffices to meet the terror threat. President Obama mostly skirted this issue on the campaign trail. But his administration has embraced the Bush view that, as a legal matter, the United States is in a state of war with al Qaeda and its affiliates, and that the president's commander-in-chief powers are triggered. This position should be unsurprising: Congress has made clear that we are at war with these groups, and the Supreme Court has affirmed that we are.
2. Guantanamo Bay
President Obama has announced that he is closing the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. By itself, this is not a departure from the Bush administration, which also stated a desire to close GTMO. The new administration is implementing this policy with greater vigor, however, and is seriously considering bringing terrorist detainees to the United States. Congress and our allies are throwing up roadblocks to these efforts. Even if the administration overcomes them, closing GTMO may have no material impact on U.S. detention practice. Because the Supreme Court has ruled that habeas corpus rights extend to detainees on the island, the detainees will likely receive no more rights on U.S. soil than in Cuba. The real question is not where the detainees are located, but rather the basis for their detention. On this issue, as explained below, the new president is swimming close to the old one.
3. Military detention
Many Obama supporters thought he would oppose the detention of terrorist suspects without trial. But not so. Last month Secretary of Defense Gates hinted that up to 100 suspected terrorists would be detained without trial. And a few weeks ago the Obama Justice Department filed a legal brief arguing that the president can detain indefinitely, without charge or trial, members of al Qaeda, the Taliban, "associated forces," and those who "substantially support" these groups, no matter where in the world they are captured. Federal district court judge Reggie Walton correctly noted that the Obama administration refinements drew "metaphysical distinctions" with the Bush position that seemed to be "of a minimal if not ephemeral character." The Obama refinements might preclude detention of some suspected terrorists who would be detainable under the Bush regime, but only at the margin. The core Bush legal position remains in place.
4. Habeas Corpus
During the campaign former professor Obama spoke eloquently about the importance of habeas corpus review of executive detentions of enemy soldiers. Habeas corpus is "the foundation of Anglo-American law" and "the essence of who we are," he said. But his administration has applied this principle in the same narrow fashion as the late Bush administration. It has argued that Guantanamo detainees can challenge the "fact, duration, or location" of confinement on habeas review, but not their "conditions of confinement." It has maintained that "the Geneva Conventions are not judicially enforceable by private individuals" in habeas proceedings. And it has made clear its belief that the limited habeas rights it recognizes for the two hundred or so detainees on Guantanamo Bay do not extend to the 600 or so detainees in Bagram Air Base. This latter position might prove more controversial for President Obama than for President Bush. The new president's enlarged military commitment in Afghanistan and Pakistan, combined with the forthcoming closure of Guantanamo, means that the number of suspects detained in Bagram--without charge or trial and without access to lawyers or habeas rights--is likely to increase, perhaps dramatically.
5. Military Commissions
On his first day in office, President Obama sought a 120-day suspension of military commissions that many viewed as their death knell. But last week the Obama administration said it would revive military commissions. The main impetus for this decision, according to The Washington Post, is that the new administration, like its predecessor, concluded that its cases "would fail in federal courts or in standard military legal settings." The new commissions rules have not been published but they will apparently disallow evidence obtained from coercion, admit hearsay only if it is reliable, and give detainees more freedom to choose their attorneys. These are not large changes from the Bush rules as they stood in 2008. Under the Bush regime military judges could and did suppress evidence obtained from coercive interrogations (though not to the same degree as they will be able to do under Obama) and declined to admit unreliable hearsay. And the Obama alteration on defense lawyers does not appear substantial. So, if we map the distance between the rights that suspected terrorists would receive under Bush military commissions and the rights they would receive in civilian trials, suspects tried in Obama military commissions gain relatively little from the Bush baseline.
6. Targeted Killing
Targeted killing is another Bush administration policy being continued, and indeed ramped up, by President Obama. The new administration has used unmanned predator drones to kill suspected al Qaeda targets in Afghanistan and Pakistan at a greater rate than the Bush administration. These more aggressive targeted killings have predictably caused more collateral damage to innocent civilians. In what appears to be the worst episode since 9/11, a predator attack earlier this month killed many dozens of civilians, including many women and children, in the Farah province of Afghanistan. The targeted killing policy has grown very controversial in Afghanistan and among human rights groups. The International Committee of the Red Cross maintains that international law permits targeting only of people "continuously" engaged in hostile actions, and that only "necessary" force can be used against them. This standard would require a significant rollback of the Obama targeted killing program. It is thus not surprising that the Obama State Department views the Red Cross restrictions as "problematic."
7. Rendition
The Obama administration has said that it will continue renditions--the practice, dating back at least to the Clinton administration, of grabbing suspected terrorists in one country and bringing them to another. CIA director Panetta has said that the Obama administration will not render suspects for purposes of torture, and many have seen this position as a rejection of the Bush form of rendition. But despite this rhetoric, the Obama administration will continue to use the Bush-Clinton standard of foreign country assurances concerning torture, a standard that prohibited rendition only when it is "more likely than not"--that is, a greater than 50 percent chance--"that the suspect will be subjected to torture." Because the public knows little about the rendition practice, it is unclear how, if at all, the practice will change under Obama. But the core legal standard articulated by the new administration appears to be the same as its predecessor.
8. Secret Prisons
While the Obama administration has not rejected rendition to third countries, it has dismantled the Bush system of secret overseas prisons (so-called "black sites") and thus has eliminated rendition to and detention in these prisons. Although the Bush administration used these facilities little in recent years, this seems like a departure from the Bush era. But even here the Obama practice may be closer to the late Bush practice than meets the eye. President Obama's executive order barring the CIA from using "detention facilities" contained a loophole for "facilities used only to hold people on a short-term, transitory basis." The degree to which the Obama policy is a true departure from the late Bush practice thus depends on the administration's (probably secret) interpretation of what it means to detain someone on a "short-term, transitory basis."
9. Surveillance
In the summer of 2008, candidate Obama voted to put President Bush's unilateral warrantless wiretapping program, which he had opposed as an abuse of presidential power, on a legally more defensible statutory basis. Obama supported the bill even though it gave telecommunication firms that cooperated with President Bush immunity from lawsuits, a provision Obama disliked. In office, President Obama has not renounced or sought to narrow any of the surveillance powers used by the late Bush administration, and has not sought legislation to reverse the telecom's immunity. Nor has he yet acted to fulfill his campaign pledge to significantly strengthen the Privacy and Civil Liberties Board that oversees and protects civil liberties in intelligence gathering. The Obama surveillance program appears to be identical to the late Bush era program.
10. State Secrets
The state secrets doctrine allows the government to prevent the disclosure of evidence in court based on its view that the disclosure would endanger national security. Candidate Obama criticized the Bush administration's use of this doctrine. But in at least three lawsuits growing out of Bush-era surveillance and rendition practices, the Obama Justice Department endorsed the same broad view of the state secrets privilege as the Bush administration. President Obama said last month that "the state secret doctrine should be modified" to make it a less "blunt instrument," and his lawyers are seeking ways to narrow the doctrine in some cases. But it is unclear how far this initiative will go, and in any event for now the Obama position is the Bush position.
11. Interrogation
On his first day in office President Obama signed an executive order requiring the CIA to use only the relatively benign techniques approved by the military field manual. He later released and rejected Department of Justice legal interpretations of the Torture statute and related laws. This is a large change in announced policy from the Bush administration, and the change that the former Vice President seems to like least. But it is less of a departure from the late Bush practice than meets the eye. Several reports suggest that a 2006 Supreme Court ruling, legislation concerning interrogation that same year, and growing public opprobrium led the Bush team, by 2007, to narrow the range of CIA-approved interrogation techniques, especially as compared to 2002-2003. Moreover, the Obama executive order established a task force to study whether the CIA should be able to use different interrogation techniques than the military, and CIA Director Panetta supports tougher interrogation techniques for his agency in some circumstances. As a result, the jury is still out on the differences between CIA interrogation techniques used during the late Bush administration and those ultimately used by Obama's CIA.

The Obama administration is still debating many of these issues, and its final policies are not all set. Its changes to Bush practices thus far--cutting back on secret detentions, probable new restrictions on interrogation, and relatively small procedural changes to military commissions--will leave some suspected terrorists in a better place than they would have been under the Bush regime (although Obama's increase in targeted killings will likely result in more deaths and injuries, without due process, to terror suspects and innocent civilians). Even with these caveats, at the end of the day, Obama practices will be much closer to late Bush practices than almost anyone expected in January 2009. Why has this happened, and what does it mean?
One reason the Obama practices are so close to the late Bush practices is that the late Bush practices were much different than the early ones. In 2001-2003, both fear of terrorism and Bush unilateralism were at their height. But in the last six years, the terror threat has appeared to fade (at least to the public), and Congress and the courts have engaged on terrorism issues, pushing back on some, approving others, and acquiescing in yet others. Congress altered somewhat and then approved the early Bush approach to surveillance, military commissions, and military detention. Rendition and targeted killings have gone on for over a decade without congressional pushback. Congress and the courts restricted permissible interrogations. Some courts have approved the state secrets doctrine as well as military detention without trial. The Supreme Court declared that a portion of the Geneva Conventions applies to the conflict with al Qaeda and rejected early Bush positions on the scope of habeas corpus. In these and many other ways, U.S. terrorism law looked wholly different at the outset of the Obama administration than in 2001-2003. The law was much clearer in 2009, and there was much greater consensus--across political parties and the branches of government--about permissible policies and their limits. Many Obama policies reflect that consensus.
The Obama policies also reflect the fact that the Bush policies were woven into the fabric of the national security architecture in ways that were hard if not impossible to unravel. The new administration would not face the difficulties of closing GTMO if GTMO had not been used as a detention facility in the first place. It would have an easier time prosecuting some terrorist suspects in civilian courts had information about their crimes not been extracted through coercion (assuming, that is, that it would have nabbed the suspects in the absence of the information gained through coercion). And so on. It is impossible to know how an Obama (or any other) administration would have dealt with the manifold terrorist challenges beginning on 9/11, or how the world might look different today if the Bush administration had made different decisions. But no doubt some of the Obama agreement with Bush policies reflects the fact that Obama inherited challenges that were created by decisions with which he would not have agreed.
A third reason for the closeness of the Bush and Obama policies is that many of the Bush policies reflect longstanding executive branch positions. Every wartime president has asserted the right to detain enemy forces without charge or trial during war. Many of them used military commissions for war criminals. Presidents dating back at least to Carter have maintained that habeas corpus review does not extend to aliens detained outside the United States. The state secrets doctrine is over a century old and has been employed vigorously by presidents since the 1970s. Rendition and targeted killings began under Clinton if not earlier. It is no surprise that President Obama seeks to maintain these presidential powers. It would be a surprise if he did not do so.
A final explanation for the congruence between Obama and Bush policies is that governing is much harder than campaigning. The presidency invariably gives its occupants a sober outlook on problems of national security. The "responsibilities placed on the United States are greater than I imagined them to be, and there are greater limitations upon our ability to bring about a favorable result than I had imagined them to be," said President John F. Kennedy, nearly two years into his presidency. "There is such a difference between those who advise or speak or legislate, and between the man who must select from the various alternatives proposed and say that this shall be the policy of the United States. It is much easier to make the speeches than it is to finally make the judgments."
President Obama has gone from a legislator and presidential candidate to the commander in chief wholly responsible for the nation's safety. He now reads the same threat reports as President Bush and confronts the same challenge of stopping Islamist terrorists who hide among civilians and who want to use ever-smaller and more deadly weapons to disrupt our way of life. He also faces the same paucity of truly useful information about the enemy and the same hard tradeoffs between liberty and security. And he knows that the American people will blame him and no one else if the terrorists strike. "The whole government is so identified in the minds of the people with [the president's] personality," said William Howard Taft, "that they make him responsible for all the sins of omission and of commission of society at large." The intense personal responsibility of the president for national security, combined with the continuing reality of a frightening and difficult-to-detect threat, has unsurprisingly led President Obama, like President Bush, to want to use the full arsenal of presidential tools.

The main difference between the Obama and Bush administrations concerns not the substance of terrorism policy, but rather its packaging. The Bush administration shot itself in the foot time and time again, to the detriment of the legitimacy and efficacy of its policies, by indifference to process and presentation. The Obama administration, by contrast, is intensely focused on these issues.
The Bush White House had a principled commitment to expanding presidential power that predated 9/11. This commitment led it early on to act unilaterally on military commissions, detention, and surveillance rather than seeking political and legal support from Congress, and to oppose judicial review of these and other wartime policies. The public concerns about presidential power induced by these actions were exacerbated by the administration's expansive rhetoric. Department of Justice opinions and presidential signing statements, for example, made broad claims for an untouchable Commander-in-Chief power that were unnecessary to the tasks at hand. Just as damaging was the administration's frequently expressed desire to expand executive power in order, as Vice President Cheney put it, "to leave the presidency stronger than we found it."
Such rhetoric was unprecedented in American wartime history, and was especially unfortunate in a war involving a novel enemy and widespread public doubts about the appropriateness of using war powers against such an enemy. The public worries about excessive presidential power during war, and prudent presidents try to assuage and meet these concerns. Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt were the most powerful war presidents in our history. They never talked publicly about a desire to expand their power, for doing so would have been self-defeating and politically stupid. When they exercised extraordinary authorities, as they often did, they put forth a grudging public face, expressions of respect for constitutional values, and explanations about why the steps were an unfortunate but necessary means to an important national security end.

The Bush administration's opposite rhetorical strategy led many people to suspect that the president was acting to increase his own power rather than to keep the country safe. The strategy's main effect was to distort the legitimacy of many Bush wartime practices that had been uncontroversial in previous wars. The early Bush administration failed to grasp what Lincoln and Roosevelt understood well: the vital ongoing need to convince the citizenry that the president is using his extraordinary war powers for the public good and not for personal or institutional aggrandizement. By the time the Bush administration began to act on this principle in its second term, it was too late; its credibility on these issues--severely damaged not only by unilateralism and expansive rhetoric, but also by mistaken intelligence in the war with Iraq--was unrecoverable.

President Obama, by contrast, entered office with great stores of credibility in speaking about the dangers of terrorism and the difficulties of meeting the terror threat. The new president was a critic of Bush administration terrorism policies, a champion of civil liberties, and an opponent of the invasion of Iraq. His decision (after absorbing the classified intelligence and considering the various options) to continue core Bush terrorism policies is like Nixon going to China. Because the Obama policies play against type and (in some quarters of his party) against interest, they appear more likely to be a necessary response to a real terror threat and thus less worrisome from the perspective of presidential aggrandizement than when the Bush administration embraced essentially the same policies.

This credibility cannot last forever, and probably won't last long without careful nurturing. The Obama administration shows every sign of trying to do just that. It seems to have embraced, probably self-consciously, the tenets of democratic leadership that Roosevelt and Lincoln used to enhance presidential trust, and thus presidential effectiveness, during their wars. Like Roosevelt and to some degree Lincoln, President Obama has chosen a bipartisan national security team to help convey that his national security actions are in the public interest and not a partisan one. Also like our two greatest war presidents, President Obama seems committed to genuine consultation with Congress. If he gets Congress fully on board for his terrorism program, he will spread responsibility for the policies and help convince the public and the courts that the threat is real and the steps to counterterrorism necessary. President Obama has also promised a less secretive executive branch than President Bush. There is little evidence yet that his administration has done this, but if it does, it will reduce the mistakes that excessive secrecy brings and produce a more responsible and prudent government.
Finally, the Obama administration is following the Lincoln-Roosevelt approach to rhetoric and public symbols. The president talks frequently about the importance of adhering to constitutional values, he worries publicly about terrorism policies going too far, and he suggests that he is looking for ways to keep them in check. He has said not a word about presidential prerogative in national security or the importance of expanding his power. Closing GTMO--especially in the face of loud opposition--is an important symbol of the new president's commitment to the rule of law even if the detainees ultimately receive no greater rights. The small restrictions his administration has placed on itself as compared to the late Bush practices are public indications of restraint, especially when contrasted with the early Bush insistence on maximum presidential flexibility at all costs. They are yet more significant because the Obama administration is embracing them on its own initiative rather than, as was so often true of its predecessor, under apparent threat of judicial or congressional scrutiny.

A good example of these strategies in action is the Obama administration's "new" rationale for detaining enemy forces indefinitely without charge or trial. The administration took the same basic position as its predecessor but placed it in prettier wrapping. It eliminated the dreaded label "enemy combatant." It narrowed the scope of those who can be detained from persons who "support" al Qaeda and its affiliates to persons who "substantially support" them--a change without large practical consequences, but a change nonetheless. And it grounded its authority to detain in Congress's authorization for the war and the international laws of war, showing that the president's detention powers were approved by bodies outside the presidency. This was the Bush position as well, but with an important difference: The Bush administration argued that it could detain enemy soldiers on its own constitutional authority, and without congressional support. The Obama administration dropped this argument (but did not reject it), and won favorable press coverage for its "departure" from the Bush position even though the change affected nothing in the president's present power to detain.

One can view these and many similar Obama administration efforts as attempts to save face while departing from campaign promises and supporter expectations. And no doubt there is an element of this in the Obama strategy. But the Obama strategy can also be seen, more charitably, as a prudent attempt to legitimate and thus strengthen the extraordinary powers that the president must exercise in the long war against Islamist terrorists. The president simply cannot exercise these powers over an indefinite period unless Congress and the courts support him. And they will not support him unless they think he is exercising his powers responsibly, under law, with real constraints, to address a real threat. The Obama strategy can thus be seen as an attempt to make the core Bush approach to terrorism politically and legally more palatable, and thus sustainable.

If this analysis is right, then the former vice president is wrong to say that the new president is dismantling the Bush approach to terrorism. President Obama has not changed much of substance from the late Bush practices, and the changes he has made, including changes in presentation, are designed to fortify the bulk of the Bush program for the long-run. Viewed this way, President Obama is in the process of strengthening the presidency to fight terrorism.

The Piracy Problem. (Consider two approaches-)

Grandpa — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 15:24:43 -0700

The Piracy Problem.
Consider two approaches-
The Stick. If the United States and other countries simply blew up any ship captured by pirates, including the crew and the pirates themselves, then, after a few demonstrations, piracy would no longer be a profitable activity. The pirates, rational profit-maximizing agents that they appear to be, would conduct backward induction and then find something else to do with their time. After the short term costs are incurred, the sea lanes would be safe until memories faded.
The Carrot. Pay the pirates to stop engaging in piracy. That was the approach of the United States and other maritime powers in the early nineteenth century; for a number of years, they paid ransom as necessary; eventually, the process was formalized as tribute payments, which made the initial capture of the ship and crew unnecessary. As Michael Oren’s recent book makes clear, this practice was entirely rational; when the United States finally decided to destroy the pirates, the naval costs were far greater than the tribute payments had been. The various U.S. administrations paid the ransoms as long as they could but eventually bowed to popular pressure incited by a sense of national shame.
Each approach has characteristic costs and benefits. The stick lacks credibility. The pirates know that no government will kill its own people, nor can governments or shipping companies refuse to pay ransoms. The problem is not so much the doctrine of double effect as the political difficulty of inflicting harm on innocents even to advance the greater good. The carrot gives pirates incentives to invest in more destructive capabilities and draws more people into the labor market. Depending on just how costly piracy is for the pirates, the implicit tax imposed on shipping could end up significantly suppressing economic activity. At approximately $100 million per year, however, we are far from reaching that point.
One significant problem is the low cost of entry into the piracy business. It would be much better if a single pirate leader controlled entry. Then we could do business with him, paying him a tribute (we might prefer to call it a “toll”) in return for a promise not to molest our ships. As a monopolist, he would have an incentive to limit “production” of piratical activity, relative to the unregulated market we currently live in. The monopolist essentially would be selling passage off the coast of Somalia, and would be constrained by competition from people who control alternative routes (which, unfortunately, seems limited). We might even expect the pirates to start organizing, or fighting among themselves, in an effort to establish a single firm that could obtain these monopoly rents. In the happy event that an organization emerged, we could call it a “state” and deal with it as we deal with any other state-paying it or pressuring to act as we want it to act, in light of its interests and capacities. We could even call this state “Somalia.” If the gains from rational management of this newly discovered resource-the power to block important sea lanes-provide sufficient incentives for Somalia’s warring clans to make a deal and reestablish a state that can control entry into the market, we should be sure to keep paying Somalia money (we might call it “foreign aid” if “tribute” or even “toll” is too irksome) rather than yield to the temptation to smash it to pieces. In the state system, sometimes you do better with an enemy than without one.
But that outcome is a long way off. In the meantime, governments will have to employ an unsatisfactory combination of carrots and sticks-mounting expensive patrols that spot and pick off pirates on occasion, while paying ransoms to those pirates who succeed.
Everyone thinks that President Obama will put together an international coalition that will solve the piracy problems. So far skeptics have emphasize the costs of patrolling, which are extremely high. But there are other reasons for skepticism. Clearing the sea lanes is a public good, and no state has much of an incentive to help others. Indeed, we have already seen that states take their own nationals far more seriously than the nationals of other states. The French attempted to rescue a French crew. Piracy was considered a joke among the American public until an American crew was captured; now President Obama is “personally involved,” according to the papers, as he never was before. These conflicting incentives will contaminate all aspects of an international operation. Some states may hope to pay tribute payments to pirates so that the pirates will go after other states (akin to putting bars over your windows so that burglars will go next door). The current practice of responding more forcefully when one’s own nationals are involved will have a similar effect. Obama will have no more luck persuading states to overcome these incentive problems than he has had in so many other areas-economic stimulus, contribution of troops to Afghanistan, assistance in relocating Guantanamo Bay detainees.
Obama has good reason to become personally involved in the current hostage crisis. Despite the relative insignificance of the problem up till now (ransom payments of $100 million per year are a pittance), the pirates’ main tactic-hostage-taking-has a way of capturing the public imagination. It also has a way of sucking the air out of normal politics and destroying presidencies. That is what happened to President Carter, when Iranian militants took over the U.S. embassy in Tehran. And that is almost what happened to President Reagan, who launched his cockeyed arms-for-hostages scheme in order to secure the release of a handful of hostages in Lebanon. The scandal nearly destroyed his presidency. President Obama has every reason to be concerned.
He also has little room to maneuver. Having just returned from a trip promoting internationalism, he has raised expectations that any anti-piracy endeavor will have an internationalist flavor. This will mean costly, time-consuming negotiations for the sake of largely symbolic contributions by other countries, if history is any guide. Having also raised expectations that his administration will act with the utmost respect for legality, Obama will either have to direct American forces to walk on eggshells or risk exposing his words as empty. If the pirates continue to take American hostages, he will have trouble maintaining these commitments while giving satisfaction to the inevitable nationalist backlash driven by the mounting sense of powerless and humiliation that we haven’t seen since the Carter years.

Follow the yellow brick road

hartsfull — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 17:31:26 -0700

The Apologists
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
By Patrick J. Buchanan

For 50 minutes, Obama sat mute, as a Marxist thug from Nicaragua delivered his diatribe, charging America with a century of terrorist aggression in Central America.

After Daniel Ortega finished spitting in our face, accusing us of inhumanity toward Fidel Castro’s Cuba, Obama was asked his thoughts. “I thought it was 50 minutes long. That’s what I thought.”

Hillary Clinton was asked to comment: “I thought the cultural performance was fascinating,” she cooed.

Pressed again on Ortega’s vitriol, Hillary replied: “To have those first-class Caribbean entertainers all on one stage and to see how much was done in such a small amount of space. I was overwhelmed.”

Thus the nation that won the Cold War, contained the cancer of Castroism in Cuba, liberated Grenada, blocked communist takeovers of Guatemala and the Dominican Republic, and poured scores of billions in aid into this region was left undefended by its own leaders at the Summit of the Americas.

Nor was this the only unanswered insult. Hugo Chavez, who has called Obama an “ignoramus” and Bush “El Diablo,” walked over to a seated U.S. president and handed him the anti-American tract “Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent.”

The book blames Latin America’s failures on white Europeans. It opens, “Renaissance Europeans ventured across the oceans and buried their teeth in the throats of the Indian civilizations.”

Civilizations? Before Pizarro and Cortez, the Inca and Aztec empires these conquistadors overthrew were into human sacrifice.

Evo Morales, the Aymaran president of Bolivia, who is using the race card against Bolivians of European descent, implied a U.S. role in an assassination plot against him.

Argentina’s Cristina Kirchner, who allegedly received black-bag money from Chavez, ripped into America for its role in the 1980s. Under Reagan, America aided Britain in the Falklands War, after the Argentine junta invaded the islands, and assisted the Contras in their war of national liberation to oust Ortega’s Sandinistas.

Again, Obama offered no defense of his country.

President Lula da Silva of Brazil, who blames the world financial crisis on “white, blue-eyed bankers,” told Obama that any future Summit of the Americas without the Castro brothers was unacceptable.

Perhaps Obama believes in turn-the-other-cheek diplomacy, though it is hard to find much success in history for such a policy. Perhaps pacifism is in his DNA. Perhaps he shares the indictment of America that is part of the repertoire of every Latin demagogue.

Whatever his motive, in Trinidad, there were not two sides to the story. There were the trashers of America on the Latino left and a U.S. president who wailed plaintively, “I’m thankful that President Ortega did not blame me for things that happened when I was 3 months old.”

But, the Bay of Pigs, had it succeeded, would have given Cubans 50 years of freedom instead of the brutal dictatorship they have had to endure. And it took place four months before Barack was born.

Obama’s silence-signifying, as it does, assent-in the face of attacks on his country is of a piece with the “contrition tour” of his secretary of state.

“Clinton Scores Points by Admitting Past U.S. Errors,” was the headline over Saturday’s New York Times story by Mark Landler:

“It has become a recurring theme of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s early travels as the chief diplomat of the United States: She says that American policy on a given issue has failed, and her foreign listeners fall all over themselves in gratitude.

“On Friday, Mrs. Clinton said ... that the uncompromising policy of the Bush administration toward Cuba had not worked. ...

“The contrition tour goes beyond Latin America. In China, Mrs. Clinton told audiences that the United States must accept its responsibility as a leading emitter of greenhouse gases. In Indonesia, she said the American-backed policy of sanctions against Myanmar had not been effective. And in the Middle East, she pointed out that ostracizing the Iranian government had not persuaded it to give up its nuclear weapons ambitions.”

Sandler wrote that Hillary brought to mind Bill Clinton: “On a single trip to Africa in 1998 ... Bill Clinton apologized for American participation in slavery; American support of brutal African dictators; American ‘neglect and ignorance’ of Africa; American failure to intervene sooner in the Rwandan genocide of 1994; American ‘complicity’ in apartheid ... .”

Yet, as C.S. Lewis reminds us in “God in the Dock,” “The first and fatal charm of national repentance is ... the encouragement it gives us to turn from the bitter task of repenting our own sins to the congenial one of bewailing-but, first, of denouncing-the conduct of others.”

Bewailing the policies of Bush as failures and standing mute in the face of attacks on his country and predecessors may come back to bite Obama.

For when Jimmy Carter assumed a posture of moral superiority over LBJ and Richard Nixon, by declaring, “We have gotten over our inordinate fear of communism,” it came back to bite him, good and hard.

http://www.cnsnews.com/public/Content/Article.aspx?rsrcid=46926

Obamas Welcome Mat

hartsfull — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 16:42:57 -0700

CNSNews.com
Obama Welcomes America-Bashing
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
By L. Brent Bozell III

Of all the bizarre fictions that the media have spread about Barack Obama, the strangest is that’s he non-ideological. The supreme purveyor of this fantasy is Obama himself.

During his trip to Tobago to meet with Latin American leaders, the president claimed “we can make progress when we're willing to break free from some of the stale debates and old ideologies.” That’s a pretty funny sentence when your foreign policy reeks of Jimmy Carter, fermented since 1977.

In a room stuffed with Marxist crackpots like Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, Obama came not to lecture, but to charm. America’s just one country among many, and he was “inclined to listen and not just talk.”

There were no “junior partners” in the Americas, just partners. He came not to defend America, but to calmly hear it trashed, and win people over with his charisma. Obama believes in his charisma far more than he believes in America.

“I didn’t come here to debate the past,” Obama declared. “I came here to deal with the future.” He explicitly claimed his own biracial skin displayed a new openness on America’s part: “As has already been noted, and I think my presence here indicates, the United States has changed over time.”

Now there’s a powerful defense of your country, President Obama.

Obama’s so egotistical he thinks America has two historical eras, Before Obama and the Glorious Now.

After sitting through a 50-minute diatribe from that communist thug Daniel Ortega, who ranted that America had unleashed a century of expansionist aggression, Obama’s response wasn’t national, just personal: “I'm grateful that President Ortega did not blame me for things that happened when I was three months old.”

Apparently, that sorry act of aggression was John F. Kennedy’s failed Bay of Pigs attempt to rid Cuba of Fidel Castro.

Few corrected Obama’s mistake – that lost battle occurred a few months before the world was transformed by his birth. The president was asked later what he thought about Ortega's speech, and he said, "It was 50 minutes long. That's what I thought."

There’s another powerful way to defend your country, President Obama.

Obama was just as non-confrontational with that other thug Chavez, who pressed him with a copy of a book-length anti-American diatribe called “The Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of Pillage of a Continent.”

Its author, Eduardo Galeano, typically described America under President Bush as a terrorist war machine in a 2006 Pacifica Radio interview: “This $2,600 million spent each day to kill other people, this machine of killing peoples, devouring the world resources, eating the world resources each day. So this is a terrorist structure indeed, and we are in danger, so President Bush is right, I think. We are suffering a terrorist menace.”

But when Chavez handed him Galeano’s thirty-year-old communist diatribe, Obama could only say "I think it was, it was a nice gesture to give me a book. I'm a reader." Being obsessed with himself, Obama also said he should have given Chavez his books. He added that Chavez’s harsh rhetoric didn’t mean they couldn’t engage in civil dialogue.

There’s only one thing wrong with that sentiment: it’s not civil dialogue for Chavez to demand that Obama read about how his country is bleeding the Americas to death.

Yet one more powerful – oh, never mind.

American reporters saw this as a glorious moment. Time’s Tim Padgett said the hate-America gift was appropriate, because Obama “proved at the Trinidad summit to be the first U.S. President to get it.” Obama “gets” the America-haters.

But how would he respond to the charge that Franklin Roosevelt’s “Good Neighbor Policy” or John Kennedy’s “Alliance for Progress” was just more imperialistic aggression? Is it simply inappropriate to defend American presidents, even when they’re Democrats? The “evil empire” narrative must always be listened to with respect – and without rebuttal?

Only Obama deserves respect, apparently. Padgett thought the Latin leftists should show respect by reading the president’s own masterful books in order to admire his “common-sense, post-ideological political philosophy.”

To glimpse at the warped worldview of our media elite, look no further than a news “analysis” by Steven Hurst of the Associated Press, who compared Obama favorably to ... Mikhail Gorbachev.

Apparently, like Gorbachev, Obama presides over a corrupt and crumbling empire: “During his short – by Soviet standards – tenure, he scrambled incessantly to shed the ideological entanglements that were leading the communist empire toward ruin. But Obama is outpacing even Gorbachev.”

The leftist media look at Obama and see themselves. There are no “ideological entanglements.” They’re just out to make the world a better place, insisting that America needs to shrink itself into a smaller, quieter, less “judgmental” partner, and do so while the Western hemisphere goes off a left-wing cliff.

http://www.cnsnews.com/public/Content/Article.aspx?rsrcid=46956

Campaign rhetoric and presidential reality: A brief history

samantha999 — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 07:30:50 -0800

Campaign rhetoric and presidential reality: A brief history

By Victor Davis Hanson

American presidential election rhetoric always paints the incumbent as incompetent in foreign policy, the challenger insightful and skillful. A look at recent history, however, shows that once the opposition gains office, the world suddenly becomes not so black and white.

The outsider Dwight Eisenhower charged President Harry Truman's administration with defeatist incompetence in Korea. Yet, in 1953, President Eisenhower continued Democratic war policies, reached a stalemate at the DMZ, and reclaimed Truman's prior unpopular war policy as his own inspired victory.

Brash-talking John Kennedy claimed by 1960 that the softie Eisenhower had let the Russians take the lead in strategic missiles. When elected, however, a more sober JFK dropped talk of a "missile gap" and continued existing defense planning.

Old pro Richard Nixon, when running for president, was said to have a secret plan to end the Vietnam War - apparently unknown to the clueless Kennedy-Johnson liberals. But for the next five years, President Nixon had no easier time withdrawing than his predecessors without conceding defeat.

Maverick Jimmy Carter claimed that cold warriors Gerald Ford and his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, had raised tensions with the Soviet Union due to an "inordinate fear of communism." Soon a red-faced President Carter scrambled to boycott the 1980 Russian Olympics and beef up the Pentagon after global Soviet aggression from Afghanistan to Central America.

After the interventions of the trigger-happy Reagan and Bush Sr., feel-your-pain Bill Clinton was convinced that his charisma could achieve through diplomacy what his predecessors had failed at through their clumsy use of force. But after 1993, President Clinton ended up bombing or shooting Afghans, Iraqis, Serbians, Somalis and Sudanese - without consulting either Congress or the United Nations.

Realist George W. Bush ran on ending Bill Clinton's nation-building - and ended up spending hundreds of billions of dollars on war and fostering democracy in Afghanistan and Iraq.

So given that history, don't expect that President-elect Barack Obama's message of hope and change will translate into all that much of either abroad.

Once upon a time, Obama or his supporters variously asserted that Iran was a hyped-up threat, that we could go openly into Pakistan if need be after al-Qaida, that the surge wouldn't work, that the Patriot Act and the Guantanamo Bay prison have torn asunder the Constitution, that we have alienated our European allies, that defeating terrorists is more a matter for criminal justice than military force, and that pushing democracy on traditional Islamic societies is culturally chauvinistic and naive.

But like his predecessors, the Obama administration will quickly learn that present U.S. foreign policy is mostly a result of reasonable decisions taken amid bad and worse choices. Therefore, don't be surprised if a President Obama continues much of what we are now doing - albeit with a kinder, gentler rhetoric of "multilateralism" and "U.N. accords."

Obama has not assumed office yet, and already Iran has mocked the president-elect's campaign suggestions for unconditional diplomacy. Already, old-new Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has indicated a desire to stabilize Iraq before withdrawing combat forces. Already, commanders have told the president-elect that a simple surge of more troops into Afghanistan offers no magical solution. Already, we are learning that whether we try more aid or ultimatums, Pakistan will remain Pakistan - a radical Islamic, nuclear failed state that is deeply anti-American rather than merely anti-George Bush.

As Inauguration Day approaches and campaign rhetoric ends and governance begins, words begin to have consequences. The truth is there are not many alternatives to the present general strategy against Islamic terrorism.

President Obama doesn't want a terrorist attack after seven years of quiet - certainly not of the sort that occurred in Mumbai last month. He may tinker with, but not end, Homeland Security measures. He may better articulate the complexities of a tribal Middle East, but he won't stop American efforts to foster democracy there.

President Obama may show more anguish over the necessary use of violence, but I suspect he won't cede a military victory to terrorists in Afghanistan and Iraq. He will talk up the Atlantic Alliance but likely complain in private that the United States inordinately does the heavy lifting in NATO. And if terrorists dared again to kill hundreds of Americans here at home, our new president would probably take military action.

Most conservatives and moderates expected that candidate Obama's grand campaign talk of novel choices abroad would end with President Obama's realist admission of very few new options.

His problem is instead his left-wing base, which for some reason believed Obama's electioneering bombast that he could magically make the world anew - and so now apparently should do just that or else!

Obama takes sharp turn on foreign policy

Grandpa — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 14:51:26 -0700

Obama takes sharp turn on foreign policy
By Bridget Johnson, 03/09/09 (THE HILL)

Lost in the cacophony of the economic crisis is the issue on which the candidate Barack Obama promised to effect some of the most change: foreign policy.

And yet, as Obama’s presidential term has buzzed with bailouts, stimulus, the budget and now healthcare reform, his administration has been steadily pressing forward with its plans to “reboot” relationships and distance itself from goals and tactics of the Bush years.
"Look at general things that have been done," Robert Hunter, NATO ambassador under President Clinton and now a senior adviser at RAND Corp., told The Hill. "A lot of things have been cleaned up from the past in terms of America's reputation," including the decision to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility for terror suspects and choosing to send the vice president to last month's Munich Security Conference, he said.

Former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton sees these initial actions differently.

"It represents a triumph of process over substance," Bolton, now a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told The Hill. Bolton questioned whether the administration's game plan of "simply talking to governments [to] change disagreements about fundamental issues" will prove useful.

Many of Obama's initial foreign policy endeavors ring familiar to those who remember his stumps on the campaign trail. His pledge to turn the military's focus back to Afghanistan was jump-started with last month's announcement that the U.S. will send 17,000 more troops to the Central Asian country, although he still faces challenges in getting cooperation from other NATO coalition partners to dial up the 40-nation effort there. "A sensible question is whether Europe will step up to the plate," Bolton said.

Obama's pledge to engage Iran and Syria diplomatically without preconditions culminated in the four-hour Saturday meeting between Jeffrey Feltman, the acting U.S. secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, Daniel Shapiro of the National Security Council, and Syrian officials including Foreign Minister Walid Muallem in Damascus.

Feltman emerged to label the talks "very constructive."

Moves such as this, said Hunter, "get rid of the underbrush we've had for so many years -- 'if you want to talk to us, you have to be a friend.'"

And Iran is being invited to a regional conference at the end of this month to discuss Afghanistan. But talks with Iran -- which, Israel's military intelligence chief claimed Sunday, can now build a nuclear weapon -- may get a boost from Obama's upcoming trip to Turkey, a country that had previously been asked by Iran to serve as a mediator between the Islamic Republic and the United States.

"I don't think the Iranian government is ever going to be talked out of nuclear weapons," Bolton said. But the former ambassador said Iran "would love to talk to the United States," feeling that the extended diplomacy would buy them time and lend them legitimacy.

Ironically, Obama's out-of-the-gate foreign policy is being powered by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, the same Democratic presidential hopeful who lambasted Obama's platform of talks with Iran and Syria as illustrating foreign-policy amateurishness.

Even though Clinton and Obama have found common cause, though, the agenda is still not without controversy.

News broke last week that Obama had sent a letter to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, allegedly offering to drop plans for the Eastern Europe missile defense system if Russia would help bring Iran in line. Obama said the New York Times story mischaracterized this cog in his wider goal to "reboot" the Russian-American relationship.

"What I said in the letter was that, obviously, to the extent that we are lessening Iran's commitment to nuclear weapons, then that reduces the pressure for -- or the need for a missile defense system," Obama said at the White House last Tuesday. "In no way does that in any -- does that diminish my commitment to making sure that Poland, the Czech Republic, and other NATO members are fully enjoying the partnership, the alliance, and U.S. support with respect to their security."

Hunter said Obama would want to make sure that the missile defense system is cost-effective and capable of stopping an attack before pressing forward on the plan. "Pressing the reset button doesn't mean Russia is going to do everything we want," and vice-versa, he said.

"The letter shows [the Obama administration is] prepared to trade [the missile defense system] away," Bolton said, adding Russia would see it as a sign of weakness.

Another point of controversy last week was Thursday's meeting of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft -- former national security advisers for Presidents Carter and George H.W. Bush, respectively -- were the sole witnesses for the "U.S. Strategy Regarding Iran" hearing. "When Brzezinski used his short opening statement to say Secretary of State Hillary Clinton should be cautious about listening to Israel's ideas, the red flag really went up," one Jewish leader told the Jerusalem Post afterward.
Both Brzezinski and Scowcroft counseled against using any military force to keep Iran from developing a nuclear weapon, advocating talks instead. Brzezinski, who said armed conflict with Iran would "absolutely devastate the historical legacy of the Obama administration," also said that U.S. policy shouldn't be influenced by the policies of "interested parties."

Yet the Obama administration has demonstrated wariness to touch some other foreign-policy hot potatoes.
Last week the Interntional Criminal Court, of which the U.S. is not a member, issued a warrant for the arrest of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. On the campaign trail, Obama said Darfur was one of his key foreign policy concerns.

"The strains that have been placed on our alliances around the world and the respect that's been diminished over the last eight years has constrained us being able to act on something like the genocide in Darfur, because we don't have the resources or the allies to do everything that we should be doing," Obama said during the second presidential debate. "That's going to change when I'm president."

The White House was muted on the warrant for al-Bashir, though, with press secretary Robert Gibbs calling for calm in the region and refusing to answer a reporter's question about Obama's support for the ICC action.

Obama has also said rebooting America's relationship with the Islamic world is a priority, and some viewed the ICC action as incendiary toward Muslims. Iranian Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani called the warrant "a plot against Islam," adding, "We consider the warrant as a political insult against Muslims; what we expected from changes in the U.S. administration was that we would not witness such stances."

For his part, al-Bashir was optimistic about working with the administration in a January interview with Asharq Al-Awsat. "If President Obama continues in his positive changes and if we felt a change, then we are ready for all the changes he will introduce toward the Islamic world and toward us," al-Bashir said.

Global reaction to Obama's initial moves will become more apparent on Obama's first trip to Europe next month, where he'll visit Britain, France, Germany and the Czech Republic, and the to-be-scheduled Turkey visit.

Hosting British Prime Minister Gordon Brown at the White House last week, though, didn't win the president fans among the British media when Brown was denied a formal joint press conference with the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes in the background. The story has had staying power across the pond, where the Telegraph reported Saturday that White House sources told them Obama was just too tired to properly entertain the prime minister.

Both of the former ambassadors who talked to The Hill agreed that Obama's foreign policy is already a sharp turn from the policies of the Bush administration.

Hunter said the aims of diplomatic engagement and global respect come "in response to a lot of pent-up demand of the outside world on the United States."

He sums up Obama's policy like so: "Try to turn the page and see what can be done together."

Bolton, however, said he's worried at the early policy indicators. "[Obama's] demonstrated that he'd like to run more U.S. foreign policy through the United Nations," Bolton said, adding that the engagement with Iran and Syria is "trying to buy him points at the Security Council in other areas."

"It's not going to pay the kind of benefit for the U.S. he thinks he can get," Bolton warned.