I must confess that in the past I too have signed a couple of letters promulgated by the Project for the New American Century. These particular letters focused on Hong Kong's efforts to maintain as much of a democracy as possible despite quite anti-democratic landlords. I could rationalize my signing tbese because of discussions I had had with Hong Kong's Solicitor General who seemed to be practically pleading for such attention from Americans or marshall any of a number of other great rationales.

However, PNAC's position as chief ideological organ of the Bush administration's neoconservative team has changed the significance of its signature-building ritual. PNAC has become an indefatigable powerhouse advocating a long list of de-thugging operations around the world (here is the roster just after 9/11) and a significant advocate of an ever larger military force to service America's global democratization crusade.

On Friday, a group assembled by PNAC wrote to Senators Reid and Frist and Representatives Hastert and Pelosi:

The United States military is too small for the responsibilities we are asking it to assume. Those responsibilities are real and important. They are not going away. The United States will not and should not become less engaged in the world in the years to come. But our national security, global peace and stability, and the defense and promotion of freedom in the post-9/11 world require a larger military force than we have today. The administration has unfortunately resisted increasing our ground forces to the size needed to meet today's (and tomorrow's) missions and challenges.

So we write to ask you and your colleagues in the legislative branch to take the steps necessary to increase substantially the size of the active duty Army and Marine Corps. While estimates vary about just how large an increase is required, and Congress will make its own determination as to size and structure, it is our judgment that we should aim for an increase in the active duty Army and Marine Corps, together, of at least 25,000 troops each year over the next several years.

Check out the list of signatories on your own, but here are just some of the luminaries who caught my eye: Peter Beinart, Max Boot, Ivo Daalder, Frank J. Gaffney Jr., Robert Kagan, Craig Kennedy, William Kristol, Will Marshall, Clifford May, Barry McCaffrey, Michael O'Hanlon, Danielle Pletka, James Steinberg.

My first reaction was "Wait, where are Jim Woolsey and David Frum?" Woolsey must be traveling or not paying attention to his email requests from PNAC, and I'm really not sure whether Frum signs letters. He might not.

My second reaction was "What an odd crowd this would be to have sitting around the dinner table together." Some of these folks are friends of mine -- full disclosure -- but the gathering of public intellectuals on this letter signifies some important new fault lines in the debate about American defense and foreign policy.

First of all, the neocons have hijacked (or have created a collusive strategic partnership with) an important wing of the Democratic Party. I have felt for some time that the left had its own neocons -- those foreign policy players who felt that American values, as opposed to American interests, ought to drive a significant part of our foreign policy calculus -- and giving this a military edge might not be a bad thing.

The ouster of Milosevic and his being tried by the International Criminal Court is perceived to be the height of success by some who served in the Clinton administration. Saddam Hussein, to many of these Clintonites, was an equally appropriate target -- and their opposition if any to Bush's approach is procedural and cosmetic, not a debate about end goals.

It has become increasingly clear -- but this letter seals the reality -- that both political parties have some real convulsions ahead among those who want to control the helm of foreign policy. The Dems have a version of neocon-lite, and the Republicans have neocon-heavies -- and they can work together when need be.

The realists and classic liberal internationalists are at odds with these policy/political machines and feel uncomfortable that America is cementing its position in the world through a rough-edged attempt at military dominance of the global system. Realists see that financial, political, and other logistical constraints will frustrate American efforts to subordinate the world this way. And liberal internationalists see this as antithetical to the kind of institution building that inspired high degrees of collaboration among nations who ended up pursuing largely U.S.-directed policies.

I feel that it is wrong-headed to solicit an increase of 25,000 (or any number of) troops a year until we step back and ask what is broken in our military/defense system.

America spends roughly the equivalent dollar amount on defense as all other nations in the entire world. It seems remarkable that given that enormous expenditure, the security deliverables seem so dismal and paltry. Americans don't feel safe. Shouldn't we be getting more bang for the buck? (or, maybe it is less bang if pursuing stability and peace...)

We need to review what contingencies of the future we should be preparing for -- and ask ourselves to what degree the Pentagon can deliver on these. My sense is that we have no clue -- and we tend to throw more money and missions at a military that is good at attacking things, but not really good at building nations or establishing civil society abroad.

I admire for their attempts to build a new bold foreign policy for Democrats -- Peter Beinart, Will Marshall, Jim Steinberg, Craig Kennedy and some of the others on the list of signatories -- but I believe that they have fallen into a trap of confusing "toughness" and "bigness" with effectiveness. Whereas a larger army might look tougher and more sizeable, there is absolutely nothing about size that makes the military better at confronting assymetric threats, or better at the cultivation of stable civil societies abroad, or even at fighting some kinds of war.

There is a great deal of inertia built into our current military structure -- and enormous waste. We spend about $30 billion on our entire foreign policy efforts outside the Pentagon budget -- and that is a rounding error for what the Department of Defense receives eacy year.

The very last thing we should be doing is throwing not only money but also human lives into a military complex that has not been held to account for its questionable performance.

In my view, PNAC's letter evades the great questions of the day of what we as a nation are all about and how we should organize to fulfill our goals. The letter notes "the dangers of continued federal deficits, and the fiscal difficulty of increasing the number of troops," but it does not deal with what the real trade-offs are. It has not advocated a reversal of the Bush tax cuts or argued that we ought to stop pumping tax dollars into Bush's pet faith-based initiatives project and many other budget items.

This letter implies that America can do it all alone -- that our problems abroad would be solved after an incremental increase in troops of 25,000 a year (none should be gay though remember). Some are trying to make this a battle between Rumsfeld's notion of a "smart soldier" or "smart military unit" that is more flexible, informed by intelligence, lighter, moves quickly vs. General Shinseki's big military solution.

The answer is that neither of these are the right solution. We need a military -- and one capable of dealing with those who are hostile to our interests. But nation-building is not a competency of the military -- and not a competency of our government as currently structured. Francis Fukuyama has pointed this out. But the biggest deficit in our thinking is that America has got to get beyond the hubris of its "multicultural man's burden" and instead realize that occupation and neo-colonial like activities undermine our brand globally.

If there are not clear forces on the ground prepared to pursue their justice (perhaps with our or Europe's advice) that are identical to the cultural and ethnic make-up of the government under attack, the the right answer is to not invade and not occupy until the circumstances are right.

More later on the Iraq elections. I would like to know whether anyone has solid numbers on the Sunni turnout.

-- Steve Clemons

If one wanted to give George Bush the benefit of the doubt about his sermon-ish and idealistic inaugural address, then one of the first fronts of reform in U.S. foreign policy must be our relations with Uzbekistan and Islam Karimov, one of the true monstrous cretins at the helm of a government today.

America gave Uzbekistan $500 million to secure basing rights in this country -- and much of that money is allegedly being siponed into the private accounts of Karimov's thuggish allies. We have evidence that Karimov killed several, if not many more, of his political adversaries by boiling them alive in water. (Here is some evidence -- but do not look at these if disturbed by graphic images; these are pretty disturbing.) He is a dictator of gross proportions -- but he is still an ally of the United States in the war against terror.

According to this report, Karimov is now applying extra-territorial penalties on human rights and aid groups for 'his perception' of their activities in Georgia and Ukraine.

From the AP report:

Uzbek president Islam Karimov on Friday threatened to restrict the activities of Western aid groups that he alleged had helped stage public protests in Georgia and Ukraine, and voiced hope that the neighboring Central Asian nation of Kyrgyzstan would avoid such events in its election year.

"Examination of some Western aid groups has shown that their activity goes far beyond declared programs and it aims at certain goals," Karimov said in a speech before the newly elected parliament.

"We have enough power to curb the aid groups that violate our laws, I hope those sitting at the balcony understand that," Karimov said, pointing to the place where Western diplomats sit.

Last year, the Uzbek authorities accused U.S. aid groups of interfering in the country's internal affairs by helping banned opposition organizations, and they tightened restrictions on foreign aid groups, shutting the office of American philanthropist George Soros' Open Society Institute for alleged anticonstitutional activity.

The Karimov government does not allow free press or independent political opposition to operate in Uzbekistan.

Here is my note to TWN readers -- particularly any U.S. military stationed in Uzbekistan -- as well as aid workers and NGO employees who work in the country.

I would really like to know the true extent of our aid and involvement with Uzbekistan. Post a note and share what you know -- or better yet, send me an email at steve@thewashingtonnote.com.

I have tried to do some quick scans of DoD and government websites, and it seems that in some cases we have programs with Uzbekistan, but the news sometimes indicates that some of this is on hold.

Karimov is the kind of character that Saddam Hussein was a couple of decades ago -- someone whom the U.S. knew was a criminal thug but helped build up anyway because it appeared to be in our short-term interests. Karimov could be a real problem for us down the road -- and we will find that we armed him and made his party bosses rich.

Even one of our flagship U.S. firms, Coca-Cola, is in cahoots with Karimov. Check out this strange and bizarre story that involves the ex-son-in-law of Karimov and his ownership of a Coca-Cola operation. I imagine that anyone that makes it up the ladder in that country must be used to operating and prevailing in a place where the norm is to destroy your enemies. But Coca-Cola dumped the owner and became the lap dog of Karimov and his goons in one night.

While this story came out in August 2001 -- I checked, and it's still raging. So, I would like to hear some arguments from reasonable people why America should not cut off Karimov totally -- and whether we ought not to hold firms like Coca-Cola accountable for their role in enriching the world's thugs.

-- Steve Clemons

Remember the EP-3 spy plane incident with China? That is the time I got to debate Richard Perle on Crossfire about U.S.-China relations. We were spying on China from the air, testing their radar systems as well -- something all major nations do.

But while spying, and testing of defense systems, is a normal, humdrum fact of a world with too many military systems aimed at each other -- testing a potential foe's systems very aggressively can trigger war quickly.

Apparently, Hersh's story on our preparation for war with Iran is dead on target. Speaking of targets, the USAF is aggressively testing Iran's air defense capabilities in a "dangerous game of cat and mouse" according to this UPI story.

Here are the first grafs:

The U.S. Air Force is playing a dangerous game of cat and mouse with Iran's ayatollahs, flying American combat aircraft into Iranian airspace in an attempt to lure Tehran into turning on air defense radars, thus allowing U.S. pilots to grid the system for use in future targeting data, administration officials said.

"We have to know which targets to attack and how to attack them," said one, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The flights, which have been going on for weeks, are being launched from sites in Afghanistan and Iraq and are part of Bush administration attempts collect badly needed intelligence on Iran's possible nuclear weapons development sites, these sources said, speaking on condition of strict anonymity.

"These Iranian air defense positions are not just being observed, they're being 'templated,'" an administration official said, explaining that the flights are part of a U.S. effort to develop "an electronic order of battle for Iran" in case of actual conflict.

In the event of an actual clash, Iran's air defense radars would be targeted for destruction by air-fired U.S. anti-radiation or ARM missiles, he said.

I'm off to Montreal to hear what the Canadians think of the military exploits of its big neighbor to the south.

-- Steve Clemons

I ran across two very interesting articles today. The first is titled "As Green as a Neocon: Why Iraq Hawks are Driving Priuses."

Read the piece, but in it author Robert Bryce notes that super-neocons James Woolsey and Frank Gaffney are born-again advocates of fuel efficiency in cars (Woolsey now drives a 58 mile-per-gallon Prius) and plant-based bio fuels.

My former New America Foundation colleague Ricardo Bayon made the link between America's SUV culture, ravenous oil consumption and terrorism some time ago in this Atlantic Monthly article, but lots of others have made the exact same case. Almost all of them, however, are progressive, pro-environment types. Woolsey, Gaffney & Co. are certainly odd bedfellows.

Then, I read this Wall Street Journal article (which I cannot link) titled "Oil, Oil, Everywhere. . ." by authors of a new oil book The Bottomless Well Peter Huber and Mark Mills on the cost and politics of oil extraction.

Here are the opening grafs:

The price of oil remains high only because the cost of oil remains so low. We remain dependent on oil from the Mideast not because the planet is running out of buried hydrocarbons, but because extracting oil from the deserts of the Persian Gulf is so easy and cheap that it's risky to invest capital to extract somewhat more stubborn oil from far larger deposits in Alberta.

The cost of oil comes down to the cost of finding, and then lifting or extracting. First, you have to decide where to dig. Exploration costs currently run under $3 per barrel in much of the Mideast, and below $7 for oil hidden deep under the ocean. But these costs have been falling, not rising, because imaging technology that lets geologists peer through miles of water and rock improves faster than supplies recede. Many lower-grade deposits require no new looking at all.

To be crude (pardon the pun), they and I think that the problem is clearly cheap oil. Cheap oil inhibits the search for alternative fuel sources.

I recently heard a superb lecture at a semi-secret leadership retreat of Sandia National Weapons Laboratories in New Mexico (they watch over the nation's nuclear stockpile) given by Cal Tech professor and Out of Gas: The End of the Age of Oil author David Goodstein in which he said flatly, "America has an oil crisis problem -- not because it is too expensive, but because it is too cheap." He said, "The Perrier in your refrigerator is more expensive than oil." Goodstein's book, by the way, is an amazing read -- highly recommend it.

I am not an expert on the politics or the economics of oil extraction, refinement and distribution -- but I have sat through countless meetings on the subject and feel that some core realities are seeping in to my consciousness about the subject.

And I guess that at some level I have been of the view that oil has been cheap for a very long time -- and that access to below 'real market cost' oil and gas by American firms and consumers have built vested interests, stifled innovation, and made us all a bit lazy and complacent about the subject.

Europe and Japan operate their economies with a price of consumed gas at the pump that is three to four times the cost here in the U.S. When I was last in London, a gallon of gas was $8.00. Most of the cost of gas in Japan and Europe is an enormous tax -- but still, these economies have self-imposed a harsher energy consumption cost on themselves and are still growing pretty soundly.

This all brings me to a dinner discussion hosted by the Heinrich Boell Foundation here in Washington a couple of months ago. The Boell Foundation is a political foundation based in Germany, with offices around the world -- including Washington, and it is affiliated with the Green Party in Germany. All of Germany's leading political parties have such foundations, and they perform similar work in civil society building as their American counterparts, the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute.

The dinner speaker that evening at Restaurant Nora (known for high-end organic cuisine) was a Member of the German Bundestag one of the founders and former Chairpersons of the Green Party, Fritz Kuhn. Kuhn is a thoughtful, very smart guy.

That night though, we politely wrestled over the topic of the cost of oil. He argued that America and the world had a problem: the cost of oil was too high.

Since the cost of oil was too high, as he put it, he argued that we needed to move more expeditiously on alternative fuel source development -- and made a lot of suggestions -- and said that we bore a moral responsibility to developing nations to keep the price of oil low. Otherwise, these developing nations would be unable to build their economies, and accumulate wealth to drag themselves out of poverty.

I asked Kuhn a genuine question (that I really did not ask rhetorically, or as if I already knew the answer. . .which I didn't); I asked him whether he had the oil cost problem reversed. I said that by keeping the price of oil low, every user's dependency on oil is maintained with little real incentive to move to alternatives. Raising the price of oil would increase the investment and interest in renewables and alternative fuel and energy sources if access to oil were squeezed.

Furthermore, the developing world needs to know that the infrastructure investment costs required in an oil economy vs. a hydrogen economy or vs. some other energy generating source can be enormous and can kill flexibility. I asked Kuhn why we were helping to addict China and India to cheap oil consumption, rather than raising the price and access so as to get these economies to build a new 21st century energy infrastructure.

Thirdly, I noted that Europe was already operating from such a base rate for the cost of oil to consumers and firms that it could easily absorb a serious price rise by decreasing taxes in tandem with the rise -- and America, on the other hand, would be compelled to adjust.

It seemed to me that the only negative downside to this was that higher oil prices now would put more money in the hands of feudal chieftains and terrorists in the Middle East, which Woolsey, Gaffney, and Ricardo Bayon think is bad.

I encouraged Kuhn to think more creatively about this and said that the Green Party movement could have a huge positive environmental impact if it could find a way to acquire oil leases and future contracts, forcing a squeeze on them, and drive global prices significantly higher.

Fritz Kuhn didn't buy my logic -- but didn't convince me I was wrong either. I think he didn't see the disconnect I saw between low oil prices on one hand and changed consumption habits on the other.

I know that there are probably a ton of problems with my formulation -- and feel free to throw critiques (constructive ones) my way. But if the problem with oil-dependency is real, then one way to get progressives and neocons to think differently about alternative sources of fuel is to drive the price up.

And in the end -- developing economies, our environment, and our geopolitical dysfunction with the Middle East could be improved.

-- Steve Clemons

P.S. For those of you interested, I will be meandering through Montreal for the next several days with lots of students who are at McGill University for an annual Model United Nations fest. It's interesting to see so many young people -- conservatives, centrists, and liberals -- get into the United Nations as a hobby.

I will be back in time to join a panel discussion on Monday afternoon -- sponsored by the American Institute of Contemporary German Studies -- on "Transatlantic Relations after the Inauguration." Details here on the website of the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy.

-- Steve Clemons

I was just invited to John Ashcroft's "Farewell Heritage Lecture" scheduled for Tuesday, 1 February, 11 a.m. at the Heritage Foundation's Allison Auditorium.

The title of Ashcroft's talk: True Faith and Allegiance.

The meeting host is Edwin Meese III, Ronald Reagan Distinguished Fellow in Public Policy, and Chairman, Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, Heritage Foundation (and of course former Attorney General).

Here is the pitch paragraph that came with the announcement:

This nation's fundamental commitment to the rule of law, as proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence and embodied in the Constitution, has promoted unparalleled liberty and equality, and prosperity and justice -- not to mention the safety and happiness of the American people -- for more than two centuries.

It has always been the case, but especially now in a time of war, that sustaining these fundamental precepts demands our eternal vigilance. There is no more critical defender of these principles than the Attorney General of the United States. As he concludes his tenure in that office, Attorney General Ashcroft will share with us his reflections on the state of our Constitution, the rule of law, and the crucial importance of our mutual work to support and defend the principles that will always make America a beacon of liberty at home and throughout the world.

What can one say, or ask, that is not obvious? I'm sure that Heritage would want a large turn-out for this event, and I don't believe in disrupting other organization's programs and don't want anyone reading this to attend with the purpose of disrupting the meeting. However, I hope someone asks where Guantanamo, military tribunals, torture memos, visa entry horror stories, and other White House approved behaviors that seem totally at odds with "his nation's fundamental commitment to the rule of law" fit into Ashcroft's mental road map.

And how does Ashcroft square Gonzales's disregard for treaties and covenants of law that seem to have been regularly sidestepped by him -- in Austin and Washington?

Here is the RSVP number: (202) 675-1752.

Asking questions of those in power is a public duty. Make your questions simple.

-- Steve Clemons

Photo credit: USHMM Photo Archives

Mark Leon Goldberg has just published a provocative and important snippet in the latest American Prospect, which I am reprinting in its entirety with permission.

Goldberg (who used to be just 'Mark Goldberg' when he was my brilliant research assistant but now has become 'Mark Leon Goldberg' as his fame advances) exposes the censorship obsessions of Alabama State Senator Gerald Allen who not only wants to block same-sex marriages (something unfortunately not all that controversial) but wants to bury all extant copies of The Color Purple and Cat on a Hat Tin Roof.

This kind of intolerant bigotry and anti-intellectualism anywhere in America is dangerous and reminds one of Nazi book-burnings or Mao's horrifying cultural revolution.

Unlike Teresa Heinz-Kerry who didn't remember (for a moment) that George W. Bush's wife was a librarian, loves books, and allegedly loves knowledge -- I do. Bush should embrace his wife's love of culture and tell his base that they are undermining their nation and are not real Americans if they persist with their censorship obsessions.

Diane Ravitch, one of my board members and a prominent innovator and policy thinker in education, wrote one of the most important books on the pervasive censorship that already exists in America's educational ecosystem. It is called The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn.

Here is Mark Leon Goldberg's excellent snippet today:

American Prospect
Burying Tennessee by Mark Leon Goldberg

No one doubts Alabama state Representative Gerald Allen's sincerity when he says he wants to protect Americans from an insidious homosexual plot to redesign our nation's social fabric. One year ago, in February 2004, when constitutional amendments to ban gay marriage were just becoming trendy, Allen beat his colleagues in the Statehouse to the punch and introduced a bill that would amend the Alabama Constitution to define marriage as "a unique relationship between a man and a woman."

Allen's bill is pending committee action in Alabama's lower house. Clearly emboldened, however, by the success of anti-gay-marriage initiatives on last November's ballots, Allen has prefiled a new bill for the 2005 legislative session, beginning February 1, that would prohibit the use of public funds for "the purchase of textbooks or library materials that recognize or promote homosexuality as an acceptable lifestyle."

Under Allen's bill, such works as Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and The Color Purple would fall under the embargo. After all, they contain protagonists who are either gay or of a somewhat ambiguous sexuality. On the December 3 Hannity & Colmes show, Allen warned that these two particular works were dangerous precisely because they blur the boundaries of acceptable behavior. "We have got to draw the line somewhere," Allen averred, "because the family and marriages -- it's coming apart."

For Allen, merely banning these books doesn't deliver the kick he's after. What he'd really like to do, he said, would be to "dig a big hole, dump them in, and bury them."

Of course, Tennessee Williams isn't the only writer who blurred sexual boundaries. If Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is suggestive, how about that Old Testament? After all, 1 Samuel 18:1-4 notes rather coyly that David and Jonathan were more than just, ahem, friends. Sayeth the text: "After David had finished talking with Saul, Jonathan became one in spirit with David, and he loved him as himself. From that day Saul kept David with him and did not let him return to his father's house. And Jonathan made a covenant with David because he loved him as himself. Jonathan took off the robe he was wearing and gave it to David, along with his tunic, and even his sword, his bow and his belt."

So if you see some guy in Alabama burying 1 Samuel, the smart money says it's Gerald Allen.
(end)

Thanks for the good piece, Mark.

-- Steve Clemons

postscript
This and this just sent in from newly appointed legal advisor to The Washington Note, Brian Greer, which hits some of the same buttons as Goldberg's article above in the battle over language as American culture finds itself increasingly hijacked by anti-intellectual and intolerant religious zealots.

-- Steve Clemons

This news just out of Iraq about the death of 31 Marines when a CH-53 Sea Stallion helicopter went down. No word yet as to whether this was an accident, or whether it was brought down by hostile fire.

Fox News and other stations are already asking whether or not our armed forces have equipment good enough to support their safe presence in Iraq.

I don't buy the line from some on the left that these soldiers made their own calls regarding military service and should suffer quietly the consequences of their enrollment as spear-carriers for American empire. Those whose criminal negligence led us into this botched war in Iraq are not the soldiers -- but rather those in civilian leadership.

If we have not armed our soldier's vehicles with appropriate armor, if we are transporting them in 'ancient helicopters' as one commentator just said on Fox, then America is yet again showing the world -- friends and enemies alike -- our LIMITS.

This is such a mistake because other powerful players will not be able to resist their ambitions and will move to secure territory, dominance over ethnic minorities within their borders, the ingredients to a wide variety of WMDs, and many other nasty goals because America has knotted up its attention and military capacity in Iraq.

Friends will not trust our ability to deliver on our commitments -- and foes will be more cavalier in their goals, thinking that America, while it talks a tough line, simply has too many self-inflicted constraints on its actions.

It shouldn't be this way. I feel badly for these killed Marines and their families -- and for the many other victims of this war.

John Kerry was right when he said that our engagement in Iraq was the "the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time," but was wrong to not throw it back in Bush's face when the President kept taunting him with these words.

Kerry should have stood his ground. Rahm Emanuel should be bolder. Howard Dean, who may be the next Chair of the DNC, never had to evolve to this position.

Democrats, in their efforts to adopt a new toughness in their foreign policy as Peter Beinart has suggested, need to avoid being seduced by the cosmetics of "toughness" which confuses attitude with effectiveness. The smart thing to do was to hide the boundary lines of American military and financial capacity. Bush and those who supported his decision made a stupid and ill-informed choice because American interests have been terribly undermined by showing all our limits. American power is deflating because of these unwise decisions.

And more than 1,300 Americans are dead, more than 10,000 wounded -- and with deaths and casualties on the Iraq side two orders of magnitude greater.

So, I salute those Marines who died. They should not have been there -- not under the terms they are there now.

But the Dems are rolling over, with lots of theatricism and cat-calls about the war and its proponents, but they still give the President everything he wants -- including Condi Rice's confirmation as Secretary of State this morning.

-- Steve Clemons

My colleague Michael Lind has a compelling commentary piece in today's Financial Times that clearly articulates the stark and bitter gap between American pretensions as expressed last Thursday by President Bush and the realities of global disdain for and rejection of America's current foreign policy behavior.

The importance of Lind's piece is that he points to a new global rejectionism of American policy and leadership in the world. Charles Kupchan predicted that this would happen; and G. John Ikenberry saw the potential of what Lind writes about in his formulation of the "Liberal Leviathian." I think that America is intoxicated by the notion of its powerful position in the world and is unaware that its circumstances are rapidly eroding.

The article is so good that I am going to reprint in its entirety here. (Normally I italicize articles or long quotes, but I won't today to make it easier to read.)

Financial Times, 25 January 2005
How the U.S. Became the World's Dispensable Nation
by Michael Lind

In a second inaugural address tinged with evangelical zeal, George W. Bush declared: "Today, America speaks anew to the peoples of the world." The peoples of the world, however, do not seem to be listening. A new world order is indeed emerging - but its architecture is being drafted in Asia and Europe, at meetings to which Americans have not been invited.

Consider Asean Plus Three (APT), which unites the member countries of the Association of Southeast Asia Nations with China, Japan and South Korea. This group has the potential to be the world's largest trade bloc, dwarfing the European Union and North American Free Trade Association. The deepening ties of the APT member states represent a major diplomatic defeat for the US, which hoped to use the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation forum to limit the growth of Asian economic regionalism at American expense. In the same way, recent moves by South American countries to bolster an economic community represent a clear rejection of US aims to dominate a western-hemisphere free trade zone.

Consider, as well, the EU's rapid progress toward military independence. American protests failed to prevent the EU establishing its own military planning agency, independent of the Nato alliance (and thus of Washington). Europe is building up its own rapid reaction force. And despite US resistance, the EU is developing Galileo, its own satellite network, which will break the monopoly of the US global positioning satellite system.

The participation of China in Europe's Galileo project has alarmed the US military. But China shares an interest with other aspiring space powers in preventing American control of space for military and commercial uses. Even while collaborating with Europe on Galileo, China is partnering Brazil to launch satellites. And in an unprecedented move, China recently agreed to host Russian forces for joint Russo-Chinese military exercises.

The US is being sidelined even in the area that Mr Bush identified in last week's address as America's mission: the promotion of democracy and human rights. The EU has devoted far more resources to consolidating democracy in post-communist Europe than has the US. By contrast, under Mr Bush, the US hypocritically uses the promotion of democracy as the rationale for campaigns against states it opposes for strategic reasons. Washington denounces tyranny in Iran but tolerates it in Pakistan. In Iraq, the goal of democratisation was invoked only after the invasion, which was justified earlier by claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was collaborating with al-Qaeda.

Nor is American democracy a shining example to mankind. The present one-party rule in the US has been produced in part by the artificial redrawing of political districts to favour Republicans, reinforcing the domination of money in American politics. America's judges -- many of whom will be appointed by Mr Bush -- increasingly behave as partisan political activists in black robes. America's antiquated winner-take-all electoral system has been abandoned by most other democracies for more inclusive versions of proportional representation.

In other areas of global moral and institutional reform, the US today is a follower rather than a leader. Human rights? Europe has banned the death penalty and torture, while the US is a leading practitioner of execution. Under Mr Bush, the US has constructed an international military gulag in which the torture of suspects has frequently occurred. The international rule of law? For generations, promoting international law in collaboration with other nations was a US goal. But the neoconservatives who dominate Washington today mock the very idea of international law. The next US attorney general will be the White House counsel who scorned the Geneva Conventions as obsolete.

A decade ago, American triumphalists mocked those who argued that the world was becoming multipolar, rather than unipolar. Where was the evidence of balancing against the US, they asked. Today the evidence of foreign co-operation to reduce American primacy is everywhere -- from the increasing importance of regional trade blocs that exclude the US to international space projects and military exercises in which the US is conspicuous by its absence.

It is true that the US remains the only country capable of projecting military power throughout the world. But unipolarity in the military sphere, narrowly defined, is not preventing the rapid development of multipolarity in the geopolitical and economic arenas -- far from it. And the other great powers are content to let the US waste blood and treasure on its doomed attempt to recreate the post-first world war British imperium in the Middle East.

That the rest of the world is building institutions and alliances that shut out the US should come as no surprise. The view that American leaders can be trusted to use a monopoly of military and economic power for the good of humanity has never been widely shared outside of the US. The trend toward multipolarity has probably been accelerated by the truculent unilateralism of the Bush administration, whose motto seems to be that of the Hollywood mogul: "Include me out."

In recent memory, nothing could be done without the US. Today, however, practically all new international institution-building of any long-term importance in global diplomacy and trade occurs without American participation.

In 1998 Madeleine Albright, then US secretary of state, said of the U.S.: "We are the indispensable nation." By backfiring, the unilateralism of Mr Bush has proven her wrong. The US, it turns out, is a dispensable nation.

Europe, China, Russia, Latin America and other regions and nations are quietly taking measures whose effect if not sole purpose will be to cut America down to size.

Ironically, the US, having won the cold war, is adopting the strategy that led the Soviet Union to lose it: hoping that raw military power will be sufficient to intimidate other great powers alienated by its belligerence. To compound the irony, these other great powers are drafting the blueprints for new international institutions and alliances. That is what the US did during and after the second world war.

But that was a different America, led by wise and constructive statesmen like Dean Acheson, the secretary of state who wrote of being "present at the creation." The bullying approach of the Bush administration has ensured that the US will not be invited to take part in designing the international architecture of Europe and Asia in the 21st century. This time, the US is absent at the creation.

The writer is senior fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington, DC

My colleague lays out the 'real' reality of things today. Zbigniew Brzezinski has been saying that we shouldn't get too worked up about the President's inaugural comments, particularly since we can't afford the agenda he articulated and because it played more like a Sunday sermon than an articulation of national strategy.

Zbig thinks we should just ignore Bush and get to real issues. I tend to agree but think that Bush's words are the sort that ought to feel like cold water tossed on a dazed person's face.

I think Mike Lind's contribution today gives us our place on the map -- but it is remarkable that Lind's commentary seems so unique today. Given the the pervasive subscription to myth and mystique of false American leadership in the world by many in the White House and much of Washington, I guess I should not be surprised.

-- Steve Clemons

Michael Powell, in my view, has not only been an unmitigated disaster as Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, he has presided over the gutting and flattening of broadband and IT innovation in the country, that may only just barely survive his stewardship.

The economic cost of lost jobs, diminished rates of investment, and the monopolistic nightmare of empowered regional Baby Bells hostile to new competition will mean that for years forward a "Michael Powell Effect" will mean a big, fat drag on the information technology sector, the broad economy and nation.

Here is an editorial that ran in yesterday's Boston Herald. I am convinced that it must be facetious praise for the Secretary of State's son. But on the other hand, it may be earnest applause. If so, it is still hilarious.

I love the last two grafs:

"I'm a big believer in the First Amendment," Powell has said, "but often I'm incredibly uneasy about lines we have to draw. No one takes pleasure in trying to decide whether this potty-mouth word or that potty-mouth word is a violation of the law."

Finding a replacement with Powell's intellect and sense of balance will be a real challenge for President Bush's second term.

But here is the entire piece:

Boston Herald
Editorial -- FCC chair's shoes huge ones to fill
22 January 2005

Finding a replacement with Powell's intellect and sense of balance will be a real challenge for President Bush's second term.

Powell will be on the prowl now for his next gig -- and serving on corporate boards is a frequent next step for someone in his situation. Let's watch and see where he goes first, second, and third. I want to see which Baby Bells jump for him first.

If this happens, the true corruption behind some of his decisions will be evident.

To be fair to Powell, he denies he is on the job hunt. This was reported in yesterday's Washington Times:

Mr. Powell declined to discuss his plans, although he is believed to be interested in the presidency of his alma mater, the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Va., a job that will open when the current president, Timothy J. Sullivan, retires June 30.

"I really want to work until my very last day here, so it's really not appropriate for me to be job searching," he said.

I'm more worried about the job "positioning" he was doing at earlier points in his tenure -- but I'll be pleasantly surprised if Powell avoids the allure of Baby Bell enticements given all the favorable, anti-competition decisions he helped generate for them.

-- Steve Clemons

I just received a tongue-in-cheek email from Jim Pinkerton who offers "You'd never get the idea that we are seeking to influence the course of Iraqi democracy -- and that's the good news here: the Iraqis won't notice such favoritism, either" and then attached the following pic and link.

We all know that Iraq is a mess -- but seriously -- why are we flying Allawi around on military aircraft? This is outrageous. Even if I found it myself to overlook the thuggishness of Allawi's past, it is inappropriate and anti-democratic for us to be offering such "soft money" support to Allawi's campaign.

Someone call John McCain and his campaign reform knights of the roundtable Rick Davis and Trevor Potter. Looks like we need a campain finance reform initiative that blocks Department of Defense soft money contributions.

U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopters fly over Baghdad as they carry Iraq's Prime Minister lyad Allawi to meet with residents in the northern city of Tikrit, Saturday, Jan. 15, 2005.

Allawi acknowledged last week there were parts of Iraq that would be too unsafe for voting in a January 30 election, as guerrillas killed 20 people in attacks. Allawi promised to spend $2 billion to beef up Iraq's security forces to combat insurgents trying to derail the vote. (AP Photo/Faleh Kheiber, Pool)

-- Steve Clemons

Sebastian Mallaby, editorial writer and economics columnist at the Washington Post and a former economics correspondent for the Economist, is a radical centrist. He is someone who strongly believes in the benefits of neoliberalism -- but knows that nations at the lower end of the globe's economic ladder have been repeatedly screwed by those at the top and are frequently and inhumanely forced to grovel for even the simplest tools to move their economies forward.

Mallaby has written compellingly and passionately about the crime of farm subsidies in Europe and the U.S. as well as the inhumanity of not doing more to help those in the worse off nations afford the drugs to help set their people on a more healthy foundation.

Sebastian Mallaby is no doubt the author of the Washington Post editorial today about the race to head the World Bank. Some people viscerally dislike 'The Bank,' but as Mallaby (whom we suppose deserved the byline) writes:

It matters who takes over the World Bank, because the institution is both powerful and fragile. It is powerful because it pumps out around $20 billion in commercial loans, subsidized credits and grants each year and because its 10,000-strong staff represents the strongest concentration of development expertise anywhere. The combination of financial and technical muscle has given the bank a lead role in many ventures that affect American interests, from reconstruction in the Balkans and Afghanistan to the campaign against AIDS to the refining of development theory.

Interestingly, outgoing World Bank President James Wolfensohn wanted to stay in his job -- but his hopes for that may have been dashed by Sebastian Mallaby's biographic volume that portrayed both Wolfensohn's larger-than-life brilliance and monstrousness, intertwined in a complex way that Mallaby argues ultimately served the bank and the cause of global development well.

But Wolfensohn -- whom I have heard from several sources -- thought that Mallaby's book would lionize him and set him up for a third term then thought that Mallaby's book destroyed his candidacy. The irony of all this is that I think that Wolfensohn's immature and childish hostility to Mallaby after the book was published may have reinforced in the minds of World Bank watchers at the White House and Treasury that Wolfensohn was too mercurial and "volcanic" and had to go.

It is quite a trick to have both the head of the World Bank irritated at you as well as the NGOs who also critique Wolfensohn and the Bank skeptical. I guess that's what makes Mallaby the radical centrist I think he is. NGOs have called some of the impact of Mallaby's commentary on World Bank projects and the NGO community the "Mallaby Effect."

Back to the races. Colin Powell and U.S. Trade Representative Bob Zoellick were early favorites to succeed Wolfensohn, but Zoellick is now pledged to serve as Condi Rice's Deputy at State. That leaves Powell, whom the editorial today endorses for the job:

Departing Secretary of State Colin L. Powell passes them (the tests of being an experienced manager familiar with complex public-sector organizations, a persuasive communicator, and must understand development), but his appetite for the job is uncertain. If Mr. Powell is not interested, the Bush administration should think outside the box.

The candidates whom Mallaby thinks do not pass the test, which he notes in the Post editorial are Labor Secretary Elaine Chao, Treasury Undersecretary John B. Taylor, and State Department Global AIDS Coordinator Randall Tobias.

I agree with Mallaby that these three don't cut the profile of a Wolfensohn successor -- and one World Bank official I had dinner with last night tells me that the Europeans may decide to go to war with us if we push Taylor. They really hate him (which may improve his chances with Bush).

But outside the box -- two other candidates that have been floated in other World Bank commentary are Bill Clinton and former New Jersey Governor and EPA Chief Christine Todd Whitman. Whitman has just writte a new book titled It's My Party, Too: The Battle for the Heart of the GOP and the Future of America.

There must be some stuff in Whitman's book that will give the Bush administration some heartburn; otherwise the book won't sell. I think that she passes Mallaby's test. I need to acknowledge that Christine Whitman has just joined my board at the New America Foundation.

The World Bank and the world beyond American shores would love to see Bill Clinton take the job -- but I don't think he'll do it. My World Bank friend here last night said that Bush might be motivated to make the offer to Clinton so as to get him out of Bush's hair and occupy him with issues of low priority to the White House. The other upside for Bush would be that Clinton's potential World Bank role would weaken Hillary Clinton's political linkages with New York and compete with her opportunities of pursuing the presidency.

But I'm intrigued. Giving Clinton another big organization, a bully pulpit even. . .If Bush and Clinton are seriously considering this -- I think Clinton could use the World Bank in many ways that would upend the White House. But as my friend last night said, the Bank would be forced to cancel its intern program.

But I am with Mallaby on this and think that who runs this important institution matters. Let's hope that Powell, Whitman, or some other out of the box candidate gets the nod.

-- Steve Clemons

As some of my readers know, I used to be a wannabe Politburo watcher and specialist on Soviet strategy and weapons systems.

There are some times when I wish the late Andrei Gromyko, former Soviet Minister of Foreign Affairs and Politburo member, was around to give lessons in just saying "No." He is remembered semi-fondly by historians as "Mr. Nyet."

Some of our leading Democratic voices, Rahm Emanuel the latest, seem to have to dissemble every time the subject of the Iraq War comes up -- particularly on whether the respective politico would have supported the war given knowledge today that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Saddam Hussein's control.

Here is what Emanuel said on Tim Russert's Meet the Press last weekend (you can actually watch the segment here):

MR. RUSSERT: You voted--you said you would have voted for the war if you had been in Congress.

MR. RUSSERT: This is the way Democrats are talking in 2005. But back when they were voting for the war, and three-fourths of both houses of Congress voted to authorize the president to go to war, as a candidate you said you would.

Note to Rahm:

Rahm, the Iraq War -- whether one adored or detested Saddam Hussein -- was a reckless gamble by the United States that has punctured the mystique of American power in the world and shown our would-be enemies our limits, financial and military. The right answer is that this battle with Hussein, which was distinct from the real-and-present-danger posed by bin Laden and al Qaeda, should have been pursued when the strategic circumstances before, during and after an Iraq-focused military effort were clearly and overwhelmingly in our favor.

That assessment of interest was never clearly calculated by the Bush administation and support from Congress was blind. Knee-jerk, emotional impulses drove us into this mess in Iraq with little accountability (yet) for those neoconservatives and their followers who led us into this quagmire.

How could you say you would not produce a different decision?

Here is what I wrote when John Kerry dissembled in similar fashion. I should really acknowledge that you and Kerry did not dissemble. You fairly clearly acknowledge that you follow Bush's logic and support his ultimate decision -- and would have done the same even when informed with empirical information that would least most rational beings to change course.

This "Zell Miller Light" strategy seems problematic to me if this is the way you hope to get more Democrats elected as the new head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

I think you are brilliant, by the way -- one of the very smartest Members of Congress in fact. But in the spirit of a "fair and balanced" critique, I hope you'll consider this alternative take on your position.

For those of you interested in more commentary on this, Arianna Huffington addresses Rahm Emanuel's comments as well and makes some broader suggestions regarding our engagement in Iraq.

Can we organize some "Just Say No" practice sessions?

-- Steve Clemons

I just wanted to write a quick note of thanks to all who e-mailed me privately or offered public comments on TWN regarding strategy, focus, and opportunities for collaboration as we try and build a new foreign policy vehicle in Washington.

I will be commenting on some of what I have learned from all of you, mixed with my and my colleague's views before long.

But for now, thanks to those of you who offered very sober and constructive advice for this effort.

-- Steve Clemons

This admittedly partisan email (below) about a new Republican Dictionary is making its way around the internet, and has apparently been leaked by some staff at The Nation. Here is reference to an early part of the project.

A Republican friend of mine who used to work for Newt assures me that what he calls "Rotundians" (or Republicans with a sense of humor) will chuckle at this. Those who aren't Rotundians will probably get me listed on a public enemy list, or throw tomatoes.

My unnamed friend's favorite definition is "Fiscal Conservative." I like a lot below -- while some are a bit over the top for my tastes -- but as admitted before on this blog -- I'm not good at humor and wit. I like the entry for "Social Security Reform."

Subject: Republican Dictionary
The Nation magazine is in the process of putting together a Republican Dictionary, created in large part by submissions from its readers. Here's what they've got so far... Enjoy!!

ACTIVIST JUDGE, n. A judge who attempts to protect the rights of minorities--most especially homosexuals--against the tyranny of the majority.
ALARMIST, n. Any respected scientist who understands the threat of global warming.
ALLIES, n. Foreigners who do what Republicans tell them to do.
ALTERNATIVE ENERGY SOURCES, n. New locations to drill for oil and gas.
BALANCED, adj. 1. favoring corporations (a more balanced approach to the environment.); 2. favoring conservatives (fair and balanced reporting).
BI-PARTISANSHIP, n. When conservative Republicans work together with moderate Republicans to pass legislation Democrats hate.
CIVIL LIBERTIES, n. Unnecessary privileges that you aren't afraid of losing unless you are a God-hating, baby-killing, elitist liberal who loves Saddam Hussein more than your own safety.
CLARIFY, v. Repeating the same lie over and over again.
CLASS WARFARE, n. Any attempt to raise the minimum wage.
CLEAN, adj. The word used to modify any aspect of the environment Republican legislation allows corporations to pollute, poison, or destroy.
CLIMATE CHANGE, n. Global warming, without that annoying suggestion that something is wrong.
COALITION, n. One or more nations whose leaders have been duped, pressured or bribed into supporting ill-conceived, unnecessary, under-planned and/or illegal US military operations.
CONVICTION, n. Making decisions before getting the facts, and refusing to change your mind afterward.
CULTURE OF LIFE, n. A reduction of reproductive freedoms.
DEATH TAX, n. A term invented by anti-tax zealots and referring to a tax used to prevent the very wealthy from establishing a dominating aristocracy in this country.
DEMOCRACY, n. My way or the highway.
DEMOCRATIC ALLY, n. Any democracy, monarchy, plutocracy, oligarchy or dictatorship--no matter how ruthless--that verbally supports American diplomatic and economic goals.
DEREGULATE, v. To pursue greed and exploitation.
DETAIN, v. Hold in a secret place without recourse to law and treat in any manner one wishes.
ECONOMIC PROGRESS, n. 1. Recession; 2. Rising unemployment; 3. Minimum-wage freeze.
ECONOMIC RECOVERY, n. When three out of five software engineers who lost their jobs to outsourcing are able to find part-time work at Wal-Mart.
ELECTION FRAUD, n. Counting every vote.
FAIRER, adj. Regressive.
FAITH, n. The stubborn belief that God approves of Republican moral values despite the preponderance of textual evidence to the contrary.
FAITH-BASED INITIATIVE, n. Christian Right Payoff.
FAITH COMMUNITY, n. Evangelicals, because they are saved, and hawkish conservative Jews, because they are useful. Israel is the bait-on-the-hook just waiting for God to take that Rapturous bite.
FAMILY VALUES, n. Oppression of women.
FISCAL CONSERVATIVE, n. A Republican who is in the minority.
FOX NEWS, n. White House Press Office.
FREEDOM, n. What Arabs want but can't achieve on their own without Western military intervention. It bears a striking resemblance to chaos.
GIRLY MEN, n. Those who do not grope women.
GROWTH, n. The justification for tax cuts for the rich. What happens to the deficits when Republicans cut taxes on the rich.
HARD WORK, n. What Republicans say when they can't think of anything better.
HEALTHY FORESTS, n. No tree left behind.
HONESTY, n. Lies told in simple declarative sentences: "Freedom is on the march."
HUMBLE FOREIGN POLICY, n. The invasion of any sovereign nation whose leadership Republicans don't like.
HUMBLED, adj. What a Republican says right after a close election and right before he governs in an arrogant manner.
INSURGENT, n. Armed or unarmed, violent or non-violent Iraqi on the receiving end of an American rocket blast or bullet spray, regardless of age, gender or political affiliation.
JOB GROWTH, n. Increased number of jobs an individual has to take after losing earlier high-paying job.
JUNK SCIENCE, n. Sound science.
MORAL VALUES, n. Hatred of homosexuals dressed up in Biblical language.
MANDATE, n. What a Republican claims to possess when only 49 percent of the voting public loathes him instead of 51 percent.
THE MEDIA, n. Immoral elitist liberally-biased traitors who should leave Republicans alone so they can complete God's work on Earth in peace and quiet, behind closed doors.
MODERNIZE, v. To do away with, as in modernizing Social Security, labor laws, etc.
NEOCONSERVATIVES, n. Nerds with Napoleonic complexes.
OBSTRUCTIONIST, n. Any elected representative who dares to question Republican radicals on the issue of the day.
OFFICE OF FAITH-BASED INITIATIVES, n. Christian Right payoff.
OWNERSHIP SOCIETY, n. A society in which Republican donors own the rest of us.
PARTIAL BIRTH ABORTION, n. A non-medical term invented by anti-choice zealots that refers to a broad class of abortion procedures; employed as a first step in reversing Roe v. Wade.
PHILOSOPHY, n. Religion.
POLITICAL CAPITAL, n. What a Republican president receives as a result of a razor-thin margin of victory in an election.
PRESS CONFERENCE, n. A rare event designed for the President to brag about his prowess as a leader while simultaneously dodging difficult questions.
PRIVATIZE, v. To steal the resources of the national community and give them to private business.
REFORM, v. To eliminate, as in tort reform (to eliminate all lawsuits against businesses and corporations) or Social Security and Medicare reform (to eliminate these programs altogether).
REFORM, n. Rollback of New Deal reforms, laws, standards and social protections.
RESOLUTE, adj. Pig-headed.
SIMPLIFY, tr. v. To cut the taxes of Republican donors.
SLAVE, n. A person without legal rights, e,g. a fetus.
SMALL BUSINESS OWNER, n. rich person
SOCIAL SECURITY REFORM, n. Leave no Wall Street broker behind.
STAYING THE COURSE, v., The act of being stubborn and unable to admit glaring policy mistakes; being wrong and sticking with the wrong idea regardless of the consequences.
STRICT CONSTRUCTIONIST, n. A judge with extremely conservative beliefs, who interprets laws in a manner that fits his/rarely-her own belief systems, while maintaining that this was the original intent of the law.
SUPPORT THE MILITARY, v. To praise Bush when he sends our young men and women off to die for no reason and without proper body armor.
TAX REFORM, n. The shifting of the tax burden from unearned income to earned income, or rather, from the wealthy elite to the working class.
TAX SIMPLIFICATION, n. A way to make it simpler for large US corporations to export American jobs to avoid paying US taxes.
TORT REFORM, n. Corporate immunity and impunity.
UNITER, n. A Leader who brings together his followers by fomenting hatred for anyone who disagrees with him.
VERY CLEAR, adj. Modifier used immediately before any preposterous explanation or rationale.

If someone comes up with an equally humorous, tongue-in-cheek Democratic Dictionary, I'd be happy to post it.

Equal time. Fair and balanced.

-- Steve Clemons

During Condoleeza Rice's confirmation hearings yesterday, Barbara Boxer relied on some thoughts penned by my colleague and friend, Peter Bergen. Here is the testimony, and I have put in bold Peter's material:

BOXER: Now, since 9/11, we've been engaged in a just fight against terror. And I, like Senator Feingold and everyone here who was in the Senate at the time, voted to go after Osama bin Laden and to go after the Taliban and to defeat Al Qaida. defeat Al Qaida.

There was no Al Qaida activity there. No cells.

It seems to me that Barbara Boxer hit the proverbial nail on the head.

-- Steve Clemons

LTC Tim Ryan feels strongly that the press is missing much of the story in Iraq, particularly the good stuff and happy news. He got a piece published yesterday in the World Tribune.

This paragraph from his article reads like something out of Platoon or Apocalypse Now:

From where I sit in Iraq, things are not all bad right now. In fact, they are going quite well. We are not under attack by the enemy; on the contrary, we are taking the fight to him daily and have him on the ropes. In the distance, I can hear the repeated impacts of heavy artillery and five-hundred-pound bombs hitting their targets. The occasional tank main gun report and the staccato rhythm of a Marine Corps LAV or Army Bradley Fighting Vehicle's 25-millimeter cannon provide the bass line for a symphony of destruction. (emphasis my own)

Here is a postscript from the Tim Ryan article:

Postscript: I have had my staff aggressively pursue media coverage for all sorts of events that tell the other side of the story only to have them turned down or ignored by the press in Baghdad. Strangely, I found it much easier to lure the Arab media to a "non-lethal" event than the western outlets. Open a renovated school or a youth center and I could always count on Al-Iraqia or even Al-Jazeera to show up, but no western media ever showed up -- ever. Now I did have a pretty dangerous sector, the Abu Ghuraib district that extends from western Baghdad to the outskirts of Fallujah (not including the prison), but it certainly wasn't as bad as Fallujah in November and there were reporters in there.

I think it is great that LTC Ryan is sharing his views and perspectives on the better side of the invasion, as he sees it.

This "symphony of destruction" line though is jostling around in my head.

-- Steve Clemons

(ed. note: thanks to JP for forwarding this.)

Snow has just hit Washington (this was written at 9:30 a.m.) -- and my plane to Miami was the last to get out before Dulles temporarily grounded flights. Good luck to those who will freeze today and tomorrow at the Inaugural festivities.

I had suggested that this coronation-like frenzy be cancelled and replaced by a more modest, quiet, dignified ceremony -- with much of the funds saved being directed to those tsunami victims who aren't going to be able to dream of such parties in their life time.

But this is the peoples' day I'm told. The citizens of the United States want to see their President take the oath of office -- and celebrate that day. The only problem is that you have to be invited to the parade to be able to just stand along the streets and wave.

The White House deceived the public into thinking it could line the parade route by securing tickets through Ticketmaster -- only to learn from Ticketmaster that only friends of 'George & Laura' were acceptable parts of the public for this event -- and that that a certified friend of 'George & Laura' number was required to act the role of American citizen along the parade route.

So, to tell you the truth, this is mostly a private event -- though the public can watch via the television. If it is mostly a private event, why is the DC taxpayer getting stuck with the bill for this inauguration -- or at least a lot of it? I really think that Mayor Anthony Williams should have been much less willing to provide the city's police forces for this event -- and let instead the federal government call in Dyncorps private cops, or its recently returned military forces to provide security. Then the nation would have had a better taste and good visuals of what a high security state we are becoming –- particularly inside the Beltway.

That said, DC cops are tough and nasty enough. I ran into one guy yesterday as I was trying to make my way through the mess that had been created by military and police authorities near the convention center. The city was gridlocked. All parking near the convention center had been prohibited. All garages were full -- so that we could celebrate our armed forces at the Convention Center. I'm sure it was a great party. There were thousands of buses everywhere.

The problem was that I had a lunch date with Georg Mascolo, an important journalist and new DC Bureau Chief of Der Spiegel who did a lot of high-quality sleuthing on the Hamburg activities of the 9/11 hijackers, at Zaytinya at 9th and I Streets. I got within 2 blocks of Zaytina on foot in below freezing temperature, and was ordered by a police officer that I could not cross at a crosswalk he was at because they had just decided to close that street to pedestrians. There was no apparent reason for this that I could observe and not that many pedestrians to begin with.

I queried why -- and he kept mumbling to me beneath the layers of scarves and mufflers he was wearing, and I indicated I could not hear him.

He then furiously pulled down his muffler and said that he had had it with me, that I could not cross there (which I accepted but wanted an explanation as to why -- particularly since George W. wasn't to place his hand on the bible for a couple more days). He was nasty -- and brought out the worst in me. The attitude of people whose job it is to corral citizens is usually nasty -- and makes Type A personalities like mine want to do battle with them. If they were far more pleasant and respectful of people, I think we'd feel less negative about the President sticking me (and the rest of DC's citizens) with part of the tab for his party bouncers.

I told the cop that I was a citizen of the district and would appreciate his having a better attitude -- and that I would be happy about walking an extra four blocks in freezing cold weather to get to a restaurant that I could see just across the street if he would be more respectful of those who are paying his salary. That didn't make him happy.

He responded that "the job of citizens is to do what I tell them to do." Not necessary. He was pushing my buttons, and me his. But I took his name and badge number -- and I'm going to tell Mayor Williams that I'd rather he not deploy any of our city's policemen and women to the next inauguration, no matter who is president, because it turns our cops into wannabe, be-really-tough-on-the locals soldiers. In fact, soldiers for the most part are far nicer and thoughtful actually.

I am sure I'm going to be blasted by some for offering gross characterizations of cops and soldiers -- and I know of dozens of exceptions of what I'm suggesting here. But it doesn't change the bottom line that DC citizens are increasingly living in a police state.

Fred Hiatt, Editor of the Washington Post's editorial pages, and someone who supports the White House's foreign policy much more than I, also bemoans the uglification of Washington behind security barriers everywhere. I wrote about this same problem some months ago here.

American democracy -- and the symbolic representation of its transparency, openness, and access -- is what Washington is supposed to exemplify. But when inaugural parades become 'invite only' -- and we mar the beauty and block general access to the marble and stone of monuments on the mall and in the tidal basin -- not to even get into the fences, barriers, and permanently blocked roads around the White House and Capitol -- then we have symbolically and visually what we voted for: a high fear/low trust government and nation.

The sad thing that I think unites Bush-supporters and those who opposed him is that all sides see dark times now, and very few envision a time of greater trust, hope, and opportunity. They may believe in different policy courses, but they all agree that this has become a time of fear and challenge for what we believe in, but we are clearly not united in how to overcome that fear.

-- Steve Clemons

I am at Dulles Airport right now, leaving for Miami in a few minutes. I will be down there with France's Trade Minister and the French Ambassador to the U.S. and a few hundred others interested in French-American economic and political affairs.

After the way I was treated yesterday by overzealous imported police officers who are pumped up on the adrenaline of bashing a few innocent DC citizens as their policeman-in-chief, well the President, is inaugurated, I am all too happy to be leaving town.

I only have a minute but will be back later today with more commentary when I am in Miami and hopefully when my article I've been scrambling on for days is done.

But we are in a time, at least for a day or two, when even die-hard opponents of Bush are being respectful of his inauguration and of seeing the will of the people in the U.S. implemented tomorrow.

Here is a press comment I just received from European Parliament Member (a member of the German Green Party) Cem Oezdemir. It's a magnanimous yet informed comment on Bush's next term from Cem -- who I know has serious problems with the Bush team's foreign policy thus far:

THE GREENS/EUROPEAN FREE ALLIANCE
PRESS RELEASE -- Brussels, 19 January 2005

I take statements from the Secretary of State-designate Condolezza Rice about the importance of relationships with traditional allies as a policy impetus for the second Bush administration. Their policy in Iraq has proved disastrous and discredited the U.S. in the world -- the Administration must learn from this experience. Similarly, their stated goal to democratize the Middle East would be torpedoed by a militarily aggressive policy toward Iran. A constructive strategy, which could tame Iran's regime with the goal of democratic change in the Middle East must involve international organizations and the cooperation of democratic allies.

A lot of people will be giving Bush a new honeymoon on foreign policy issues -- but all I can say is that all of those pundits who thought that Iraq had been so disastrous that the neocons would be out and the realists back in, were amazingly off target.

I argued that I saw no empirical evidence of neocon decline -- and I think that we need to be careful of giving Bush too much room to run right now.

More later. . .from Miami.

-- Steve Clemons

I am writing an article today, so regrettably don't have time to post much. However, I have been inundated with emails and bits of advice and encouragement about something I noted in one of my comments regarding building a credible and compelling alternative to neoconservative foreign policy thinking.

One of my readers wrote --

Dear Steve:

Anonymous Lady

For now, I am interested in getting the foreign policy part of this initiated and don't want to tackle all issues until we have developed a road map for tackling one. Josh Marshall seems to be doing a great job saving social security -- so I'd like to focus for the time being on national security and foreign policy challenges. And then broaden as the strategy succeeds (or fails?).

I have my own thoughts on how to develop a network of talented people and alternative foreign policy thought -- but I am really interested in learning what I can from those of you reading this. Some of the challenges involve sorting through the great diversity of thinking in centrist and progressive circles on foreign policy. Peter Beinart wants the Dems to be tough, and the DLC loves his stuff.

Others think that a constructive, enlightened policy can be successfully pursued by Democrats without chasing a "Zell Miller Light" strategy.

By the way, I'm much more interested in developing a foreign policy strategy that either party might adopt as its own -- not just the Democrats as many of my moderate Republican friends support this initiative. But, the Democratic Party seems to me more hijackable at the moment -- though I think that Republican foreign policy circles need to have a civil war, and I have an active hand in that.

Grover Norquist started his weekly meetings pretty small and broadened them -- and didn't insist on uniformity of views among conservatives. What implications are there for a Democratic coordination circle that tried the same?

The Project for the New American Century was very public with its plans, its members and intentions. Should this process we are trying to launch be as public?

There are dozens of other questions that could be sorted through -- and many of you know them better than I.

What would be very useful is for people to take a bit of time and think about this and share whatever constructive thoughts on strategy, design, focus, themes, diversity of perspective, etc. I will only read those suggestions that are written in a constructive manner, and will even read those who disagree with the policy direction I am suggesting if written in a way that is respectful and responsible.

If you don't want to post your comments publicly, my private email is steve@steveclemons.com.

Look forward to hearing from you today.

Now, I'm back to work. . .

-- Steve Clemons

I am supposed to be cranking on a review of Anatol Lieven's America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism, and actually I am. However, I couldn't resist picking up a galley copy of Eric Liu's new book, Guiding Lights: The People Who Lead Us Toward Purpose in Life.

This is the perfect book to get on Oprah, spend a morning with Katie Couric, and even to get on Letterman. Some will spoof it -- like I am tempted to do and may do yet in this post. But millions and millions of parents are going to rush to buy this book.

It is written by a Blue State guy -- who worked in the middle of the Clinton White House -- but it captures the essence of family values/white picket fence/let's all just be positive about ourselves style thinking that really sells in red states.

It's an optimistic book -- but regrettably way too optimistic and positive for me. I need to confess that Eric Liu is a friend and colleague of mine at the New America Foundation.

But so is Robert Wright, a Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation and author of NonZero: The Logic of Human Destiny, who also penned "War on Evil" in Foreign Policy magazine recently. According to Wright, stark treatments of good and evil debilitate and constrain healthy debate, and that -- he argues -- has been a central tactic of the Bush administration.

From Wright's thoughtful essay:

Some conservatives dismiss liberal qualms about Bush's talk of evil as knee-jerk moral relativism. But rejecting his conception of evil doesn't mean rejecting the idea of moral absolutes, of right and wrong, good and bad. Evil in the Manichaean sense isn't just absolute badness. It's a grand unified explanation of such badness, the linkage of diverse badness to a single source. In the Lord of the Rings, the various plainly horrible enemy troops -- orcs, ringwraiths, and so on -- were evil in the Manichaean sense by virtue of their unified command; all were under the sway of the dreaded Sauron.

For the forces of good -- hobbits, elves, Bush -- this unity of badness greatly simplifies the question of strategy. If all of your enemies are Satan's puppets, there's no point in drawing fine distinctions among them. No need to figure out which ones are irredeemable and which can be bought off. They're all bad to the bone, so just fight them at every pass, bear any burden, and so on.

But what if the world isn't that simple? What if some terrorists will settle for nothing less than the United States' destruction, whereas others just want a nationalist enclave in Chechnya or Mindanao? And what if treating all terrorists the same -- as all having equally illegitimate goals -- makes them more the same, more uniformly anti-American, more zealous? (Note that President Ronald Reagan's "evil empire" formulation didn't court this danger; the Soviet threat was already monolithic.)

Anatol Lieven also deals with America's "good vs. evil" habit. He writes:

Bush and his leading officials. . .possessed, and expressed, a boiled-down, simplified and extreme version of a vision of America which is in fact held very widely in American society and has deep historical roots: "The U.S. primarily goes to war against evil, not in its self-perception, to defend material interests."

In addressing how this technique was used by other Presidents, such as Harry Truman, Lieven writes:

. . .The dubbing of the enemy as an enemy of civilization itself and teh embodiment of evil. . .also suggested that it was pointless to seek to understand his motives, even if doing so was in order the better to resist him.

And as applied to the post-9/11 era:

The tendency both to demonize and to homogenize different kinds of "enemy" has had a specific and very damaging aspect in the context of 9/11 and the struggle against terrorism. Immediately after 9/11, Bush eliminated any discussion of the concrete issues at stake between the United States and Islamist radicals from his own and the administration's public statements. Indeed, avidly abetted by most of the media and the political class, public discussion of these issues was to a great extent suppressed.

Now, back to Eric Liu's Guiding Lights. From what I have been able to tell so far from his book and in previous meetings and discussions I have enjoyed with him at New America, he does not deal with evil. This is a book entirely about good stuff, living a fulfilling life, on good influences.

He writes in his forward:

One day I was speaking with a group of doctors who teach in medical residency programs. I asked them who their most significant influences were. Their answers were wonderful: My mom. My grandfather. My first boss. My husband. My swim coach. Franz Kafka. my residency director. My freshman econ professor. Bach. A family friend. My hometown physician. Virginia Woolf. My piano teacher. My eighty-seven-year-old neighbor who taught me how to live.

There is something very alluring about Liu's book because I think it depicts what many hope for: a world that might just be this innocent. Though I admit that Kafka's and Virginia Woolf's presence in the list above doesn't make this a complete Pleasantville exercise.

When I first heard Eric Liu's presentation of an outline of this book of interviews of people -- race car drivers, acting coaches, scientists, artists, CEOs, athletes, etc. -- who taught, people who learned, and how it all happened, I suggested a "Darth Vader" chapter. How did drug dealers learn to become drug dealers? What motivated suicide bombers and terrorists?

Brent Scowcroft may agree with me, I think. In his comments on January 6th at a forum I chaired, Scowcroft said:

You know five years ago, a suicide bomber was the occasion of a front page about 'what motivates the suicide bombers,' 'how could people do this,' 'how do they recruit,' and so on. Now there seems to be a waiting list. There's a suicide bombing every day and no one even notices that somebody prepares to either drive a truck or strap weapons on and blow themselves up. What's behind this? What is the phenomenon that leads to the kind of warfare that we are singularly unequipped to deal with? So we've got to get to the roots of what drives terrorism and respond -- not for '05 necessarily, but we need to deal with that phenomenon.

I am interested in the dark sides of behavior -- not mushing it all together so that we don't see or understand its component parts, which Robert Wright and Anatol Lieven suggest is an ineffective way to come to terms with the many faces of "evil." In fact, I think that many behaviors considered bad by some are simply part of human diversity, like Alfred Kinsey discovered.

I do think that Eric Liu's book might have been better had he included chapters asking dictators, thugs, narco-kings, thieves, and terrorists how they teach what they do -- or maybe how they learned -- but I don't think Oprah Winfrey would then be as enthusiastic as I imagine she will be for this book.

And the title, Guiding Lights Does anyone remember Poltergeist? Carol Anne, "Don't go into the light!" Now, I'm being facetious.

Congrats to Eric on his book -- but I am tempted to write the dark world version of this volume if he has a best-seller here.

-- Steve Clemons

This notion of a "sex bomb" was conceived of by a U.S. military that apparently thought that gays in the military was so horrific that compelling gay behavior among the enemy might be a war-winning idea.

The Clinton administration apparently canned the idea, and I don't think it has come back during the Bush administration.

Wait -- those pictures at Abu Ghraib of captives forced to engage in homosexual-like acts...maybe that was just R&D.

On the moral consequences of the Iraq War, Zbigniew Brzezinski comments:

A great deal of what is happening thus far in American foreign policy has been influenced by the ongoing conflict in Iraq. Now I would like to say very briefly that in my view, that war which was a war of choice is already a serious moral set back to the United States. A moral set back both in how we start, how it was justified, and because of some of the egregious incidents that have accompanied this proceeding. The moral costs to the United States are high. It's a political setback.

"Mission Accomplished" are words that many in this administration want to forget.

-- Steve Clemons

Sidney Blumenthal, who not only attended last Thursday's luncheon with Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski but helped give it a bit of zest with this article on Scowcroft being shoved outside the door of Bush administration insiders just days before the meeting, wrote this in today's Guardian.

Blumenthal recounts not only Brzezinski's and Scowcroft's cautionary characterizations of what is unfolding in Iraq, but continues to emphasize something radically important. The administration doesn't want its progress towards its goals to be measured, or even measurable.

He writes:

In April 2004 the Strategic Studies Institute of the Army War College produced a report on the metrics of the Rumsfeld doctrine: Toppling Saddam: Iraq and American Military Transformation. It concluded that the swift victory over Saddam was achieved by overwhelming technological superiority and Iraqi weakness, and therefore using operation Iraqi Freedom as "evidence" for Rumsfeld's "transformation proposals could be a mistake". The Pentagon has refused to release the study.

President Bush clings to good news and happy talk, such as the number of school openings in Iraq. Those with gloomy assessments are not permitted to appear before him. The president orders no meetings on options based on worst-case scenarios. Military strategists and officers are systematically ignored. Suppression of contrary "metrics" is done in his name and spirit. Bush makes his decisions from a self-imposed bunker, a situation room of the mind, where ideological fantasies substitute for reality.

Bush and his team frown on metrics and cut off those -- even the RAND Corporation -- with alternative assessments of threats and what to do about them. RAND has always been the consummate insider institution, sort of the medulla oblongata of the military-industrial complex as I have observed.

I first met Donald Rumsfeld at RAND many years ago. He was early for a meeting, and my session in the room he wanted was ending late, or I was dithering and wanting another cup of coffee and a cookie -- so I talked to him a bit. I kept thinking that this tough but smart, sharply dressed guy seemed like a pre-humbled Robert McNamara.

And today, Sid Blumenthal and many others who are writing about the hostility of the administration to real debate and the systematic consideration of alternative policies are reminding us that the worst behaviors of McNamara and the team around Kennedy and Johnson in the early build-up in Vietnam -- their intellectual arrogance and aversion to empirical evidence that did not affirm their positions -- are happening again. Again.

-- Steve Clemons

At the event I hosted a week ago today, Mort Kondracke was among the approximately 45 guests. Mort is an open-minded 'radical centrist/moderate independent' columnist who thinks, like I do, that blind faith by many to anachronistic perspectives as well as 'inertia' explain government policy better than most any other set of drivers. I think he is a guy who believes in good public policy and not letting laziness, ideological or otherwise, preempt policy outcomes the nation deserves.

In his syndicated column, he writes about the lunch meeting we had and challenges Scowcroft's and Brzezinski's brands of realism with a well-argued alternative take on where we are with Iraq and the upcoming elections.

In one graf, he writes:

The session was sponsored by the nonpartisan New America Foundation, usually a font of crisp new ideas for solving the nation's problems. At the moment, NAF seems to be dedicated to a reversal of Bush's "neo-conservative" foreign policy and a return to the "realism" associated with Bush's father and increasingly favored by many Democrats.

I need to spend some time with Mort so that he knows that what we are trying to do in my new foreign policy project here is to not fall back into the stale grooves of old-style realism and instead look forward to developing some new parameters and benchmarks for American foreign policy.

Realism and its roots will be an important part of developing a forward-looking foreign policy framework, but "realism" as it used to be simply doesn't fix America's or the world's current problems. Realism modernized, reformed, and broadened seems to me to be a worthwhile discussion to have -- but I'm sure that derivatives of yesterday's realism would only be an ingredient in a more enlightened U.S. foreign policy framework.

Interestingly, Scowcroft mentioned this at the beginning of his remarks when he commented on how globalization of problems was undoing the nation-state and making it vastly harder for nation-states to realistically assess and counter global problems, particularly on their own.

Scowcroft said:

The second thing I want to talk about today is "Globalization," a kind of a buzz-word now. But I mean it in the most fundamental sense: the change in the way the world operates.

It is a fundamental erosion of national boundaries, and therefore the role of the nation-state. There are so many forces; economic forces, technological forces, environmental forces and political forces, terrorism being one of these as well, that are flowing back and forth across borders and defying the nation-state’s ability to do what the nation-state has always done, which is to provide for the security and welfare of its citizens.

I want to link Mort Kondracke's piece today because he was not swept away by the presentations by Scowcroft and Brzezinski and debated them on their own terms (without distorting their meaning or intent).

Mort does know how to do it, and he'll hopefully be a regular at our foreign policy forums.

-- Steve Clemons

I think everyone on both sides (if there are only two) of the debate that unfolded on David Frum's and my blogs yesterday regarding the appropriate use and meaning of the words, 'incipient' and 'imminent' will find this editorial in the Manchester Union Leader something to laugh about.

The only problem is that the editorialists there need to know that there are incipient social security problems that can be dealt with now -- with relatively minor benefits adjustments -- thus precluding a future crisis. What is imminent is a health care crisis in the nation and ballooning Medicare costs that seem to be strangely absent in this debate about the demographically driven financial challenges facing the country.

I don't want to debate social security here today; we'll leave that battle for another time. But the headline of the article was too good to pass up.

-- Steve Clemons

(ed. note -- thanks to VS for sending this)

David Frum responds to yesterday's post on Brent Scowcroft and a possible Iraqi civil war with a supercilious and I think incorrect commentary on the fine differences between the words 'incipient' and 'imminent'.

I'll let the linguists out there be the judge of who has the better part of that lexical exercise. Bill Safire could have some fun with this. But the last time David and his friends played fast and loose with the word 'imminent', it cost us more than a thousand American lives -- and counting.

So when it comes to that word it's my policy to keep him and his crew on short leash.

-- Steve Clemons

George Gedda of the Associated Press has written this interesting article today that refers to the comments made by Brent Scowcroft at last Thursday's New America Foundation lunch meeting.

A bit of an excerpt:

At age 79, Brent Scowcroft doesn't have much to lose if he speaks his mind. So despite his close ties to the first President Bush, he's not averse to keeping his distance from the second.

If the Iraqi elections are held as scheduled, it would "grease the slide to civil war," Diamond told The Washington Post. Calling Bush "a very stubborn man," he said there is "a fine line between Churchillian resolve and self-defeating obstinacy, and I think he's going over the line on this."

What I find interesting is that the debate that is buzzing around Washington since Scowcroft's and Brzezinski's comments is mostly happening among and between conservatives, while progressives for the most part are voyeurs in this battle, but not contributing much to the substance of discussion.

Justin Raimondo at Antiwar.com also captures this trend in a piece today that has had some influence in interesting circles.

I head from a source I cannot name that a digested version of Raimondo's article with some additional comments from the text of the Scowcroft/Brzezinski presentations made it into a widely read but classified daily report that is read by the commissioners and senior staff in the European Commission and also by top officials in other European governments. They may have gotten the unclassified version via Maureen Dowd or this website -- but the point is people around the world are paying attention to this battle that is going on inside the beltway.

I am not intending to say that progressives are irrelevant to this discussion -- but I do mean to say that Scowcroft's public comments have served the symbolic purpose of telling other centrist/realists that they no longer need to apologize for the mistakes and errors of the administration -- that it's ok now to take off the gloves -- that it's ok, and perhaps even a good thing at this point, to oppose the foreign policy direction of President Bush.

Some conservatives, David Frum being one, are trying to paint acolytes of "Scowcroftism" as Democrats and liberals, or at minimum, as disloyal. But the bottom line is that Scowcroft and the others who seem to be lining up and offering similar comments are card-carrying Republican conservatives.

This is an important fault line that needs to be explored further by those hoping to cobble together a more enlightened U.S. foreign policy that brings together some in progressive circles with the increasingly disaffected and sensible realists and centrists in the Republican party.

-- Steve Clemons

I am re-reading Anatol Lieven's America: Right or Wrong -- An Anatomy of American Nationalism, which I am reviewing and have a drop-dead deadline on Monday. At the end of the first chapter, he recounts something J.William Fulbright wrote in Arrogance of Power that I think deserves space on this blog:

Only a nation at peace with itself, with its transgressions as well as its achievements, is capable of a generous understanding of others. . . When a nation is very powerful but lacking in self-confidence, it is likely to behave in a manner dangerous to itself and to others.

In so doing, we are not living up to our capacity and promise as a civilized example for the world. The measure of our falling short is the measure of the patriot's duty of dissent.

I do believe that too much of our current debate about U.S. foreign policy focuses on cosmetics -- but there is something to the notion that America is suffering from an arrogance of power and that the minor act of pursuing our interests while at the same time treating other mostly like-minded nations with some dignity would yield some good results.

Lieven writes that his book "is an appeal to return to the older American traditions of Realist diplomacy softened by ethics and conscience."

This is something to think about. I will post my review of Lieven's book once my article is edited and up on the website of the publisher.

-- Steve Clemons

David Frum gets starchy about the dangers of rising Scowcroftism in foreign policy circles. My sense is that those of us who have a problem with the neoconservative agenda have a lot of work to do to roll back the influence of David Frum and his fellow travelers -- but if we are causing them pain, all the better.

One note to David: "incipient" and "imminent" have very different meanings, and you ought to use the one Scowcroft used if you hope to have a credible battle with his views.

imminent (P) Pronunciation Key (m-nnt)
adj.
About to occur; impending: in imminent danger.

[Middle English iminent, from Old French imminent, from Latin imminns, imminent- present participle of imminre, to overhang : in-, in; see in-2 + -minre, to jut, threaten; see men-2 in Indo-European Roots.]

incipient (P) Pronunciation Key (n-sp-nt)
adj.
Beginning to exist or appear: detecting incipient tumors; an incipient personnel problem.

also,
adj : only partly in existence; imperfectly formed; "incipient civil disorder"; "an incipient tumor"; "a vague inchoate idea" [syn: inchoate]

Frum writes:

. . .Scowcroft has been spanked for his restiveness. He has been dropped as chairman of the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. Yet as the Sun points out, if Scowcroft has been demoted, Scowcroftism has not been. There are signs that the habits of mind that Scowcroft brought to foreign policy continue to exert influence over many senior policy makers. Just this morning, for example, the New York Times has a front page story that reads as if dictated by Scowcroft -- which, come to think of it, it probably was.

The theme of the piece is that civil war is imminent in Iraq, that the elections are making things worse, and that there's nothing to do but scuttle. The result of such a policy would be chaos -- but chaos in Iraq, the sources for the story seem to think, is well worth it if they can get in return a political defeat for President Bush.

I hosted the meeting with Scowcroft -- and nothing he said could be interpreted as implying that an Iraqi Civil War was imminent. Here is what David Sanger and Eric Schmitt wrote in the New York Times piece referred to by David Frum (David Sanger was an attendee of the New America Foundation lunch meeting with Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski):

Already, the president found himself in a rare public argument last week with one of his father's closest friends and advisers, Brent Scowcroft, the former national security adviser. The election "won't be a promising transformation, and it has great potential for deepening the conflict," Mr. Scowcroft declared Thursday, adding, "We may be seeing incipient civil war at this time."

Thus, whereas I see General Scowcroft's cautionary comments for what they actually are -- cautionary. David Frum either accidentally, or purposely, sensationalizes Scowcroft's meaning and mischaracterizes Sanger's and Schmitt's reporting.

Which is it David? Accident? Or was this conscious mischaracterization?

The reason I ask is that the Washington Times made exactly the same mistake yesterday -- and acknowledged the error immediately. In an article titled "Iraq Violence Foreseen Continuing After Election," Audrey Hudson wrote:

Mr. Powell made his final rounds of the Sunday talk shows and was asked repeatedly to respond to a prediction last week of "imminent civil war" by Brent Scowcroft, who was national security adviser to two previous Republican presidents - Gerald Ford and George Bush.

When contacted, the staff at the Washington Times immediately tracked down the desk editor who had changed 'incipient' to 'imminent.' The paper reported to me that they would print a correction right away, which they now have.

Will you print a correction, David?

-- Steve Clemons

The transcription process for this event that has received a lot of attention in the media as well as my attention in entries below was complicated by the fact that the New America Foundation (in which I have a fairly substantial role) has unbelievably low quality recording and taping equipment. Thus, we were unable to send this out for standard transcribing.

At long last, our team -- including Jennifer Buntman, Jerry Irvine, Swati Pandey, Joanna Lederman, Robynn Sturm, Katie Willers, and yours truly -- have finished this monster.

The transcript of the presentations was already posted below, but here it is again. And the Q&A of transcripts is available now here.

If you would like to watch the broadcast over the web, click here.

David Sanger, another attendee at the lunch, wrote this in the New York Times today -- again referencing Scowcroft's cautionary comments.

-- Steve Clemons

Here is the last part of Maureen Dowd's New York Times piece today, "Defining Victory Down," that lashes the Bush administration for its imperviousness to feedback.

Again, the Thursday forum that we hosted with Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft gets a lot of play:

The arrogant Bush war council never admits a mistake. Paul Wolfowitz, a walking mistake, said on Friday he's been asked to remain in the administration. But the "idealists," as the myopic dunderheads think of themselves, are obviously worried enough, now that Mr. Bush is safely re-elected, to let a little reality seep in. Rummy tapped a respected retired four-star general to go to Iraq this week for an open-ended review of the entire military meshugas.

It is a lesson never learned: Matters of state and the heart that start with a lie rarely end well.

-- Steve Clemons

Brent Scowcroft's comments last Thursday at the inaugural meeting of my new foreign policy project, New Solarium Project on U.S. Foreign Policy, have really riled up those who are gambling that Iraq's January 30th elections are going to usher in an era of stable governance and democracy for Iraqis.

Scowcroft said:

The Iraqi elections, rather than turning out to be a promising turning point, have the great potential for deepening the conflict. Indeed we may be seeing an incipient civil war at the present time.

The New York Times' Steve Weisman mentions Scowcroft's Thursday remarks in his article today, "U.S. Is Haunted by Initial Plan for Iraq Voting."

Here is the transcript for the meeting which included both former National Security Advisors Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski (though the Q&A session is still being transcribed).

For those interested, this was the audience roster (as I've had many, many people asking who was there)

My friend and colleague Noah Feldman, who is a very smart legal scholar on Islam and democracy at New York University Law School, has previously advised that Iraq's upcoming election becomes one of the first new items in a toolbox of legitimacy in any future Iraqi government. He sees that fact as a huge problem if the Sunnis fail to participate in the upcoming election -- either because of conscious choice to boycott the elections or because of fear among voters of insurgent violence.

If the Sunnis do not participate, for whatever reason, they will not be structurally connected to the foundation of legitimacy for a new Iraqi state -- and that itself could assure civil war within Iraq.

Feldman spoke at the New America Foundation on this subject and published op-eds in the Wall Street Journal and New York Times making the same point, but the material is not available on the web. Matthew Yglesias had this reaction when he attend Noah's talk.

Doyle McManus, in this Los Angeles Times article, also reports Noah's thinking:

. . ."It would be very hard for the Shia parties to do that (come back to participating in government) after the fact," said Noah Feldman, a law professor at New York University who helped draft Iraq's interim constitution. Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the most influential Shiite religious leader, "would likely say it was a terrible idea, because it would violate the principle of a majoritarian election."

Feldman said that if Sunnis were underrepresented in the new assembly, "the great danger would be holding a constitutional negotiation in which the Shia and Kurds act as if they were the entire country."

One his last show of 2004, Chris Matthews included Andrew Sullivan in his program -- and Andrew made two very memorable points while I remember virtually nothing from the other commentators.

Sullivan noted that his favorite movie of the year was Team America: World Police. Here is my own commentary on the film and on "Fuck Yeah Americans."

But when each person was asked by Matthews what would be the most unexpected and surprising thing that could happen in 2005, Andrew Sullivan said he hoped that the January 30th elections in Iraq would deliver a far more stable situation for Iraqis than seems conceivable today.

I hope Andrew Sullivan gets what he wants -- but I have to admit that Scowcroft, Feldman, and many others are not inventing these problems that we are discussing.

They are raising serious questions about how this electoral process is unfolding -- and the Bush administration seems unwilling to re-tool and help Iraq redirect this pouring of the new foundation for Iraq's democracy because, as usual, Bush doesn't seem to want to be told he might be wrong.

And yes, I know I haven't discussed Allawi or the Iraqis' role in this discussion because I believe that if the White House saw merit in re-grouping regarding the terms by which this election will be held, I believe it would happen.

-- Steve Clemons

A small meeting I hosted on Thursday with former National Security Advisors Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski to inaugurate the launch of a suite of new foreign policy programs at the New America Foundation continues to draw attention.

Watch for an article in tomorrow's New York Times by Steve Weisman that draws on material from the luncheon discussion. There are now countless articles out there on the web that address Scowcroft's comments and President Bush's rebuttal.

There are also many who are writing about Zbigniew Brzezinski's comments that America must address the fact that it has already suffered a major moral set back and military set back because of the Iraq War. Brzezinki's comments that to win this war, America would have to commit 500,000 troops, spend $200 billion a year, consider reinstituting the draft, and take other steps have also stirred debate.

The rough transcript of their remarks (which were extemporaneous) is available here. We are still working on the Q&A section.

If you would like to watch the speeches and Q&A, you may click here and watch the event over the web.

More to come.

-- Steve Clemons

This requires Quick Time to watch, but we have just posted a streaming video link to the lunch meeting I chaired yesterday with former National Security Advisors Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski.

You can watch the program here. I know that the sound could be light years better, but shortly, we should have some transcripts up, at least a rough cut.

-- Steve Clemons

A short while ago, reporters asked President Bush for a reaction to comments made at the foreign policy luncheon I organized yesterday in the Senate with former National Security Advisors Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski. We have been flooded by calls for the transcript ever since -- and will be posting them shortly on this site.

Until then, here is a Washington Post article that was just published on the web (and out in tomorrow's paper) by William Branigan on President Bush's reaction to Brent Scowcroft's cautionary comments that an "incipient civil war" may be ignited after the January 30th elections.

In addition, here is a different article in the Washington Post that ran in today's newspaper by Dana Priest and Robin Wright that mentions the event and comments made.

Also, Ronald Brownstein of the Los Angeles Times had this piece on the event covering both Scowcroft's and Brzezinski's comments. Here is a follow-up article just posted on the LA times website by Brownstein on George Bush's reaction.

Chris Nelson, who publishes the 'uber-insider' (as Josh Marshall calls it) Nelson Report, reported this in his 6 January issue about the event and discussion:

The Nelson Report, 6 January 2006 (excerpts)

-- Scowcroft repeated a warning this Report has made for the past two years...that IF there is a breakdown in the 6 Party process, it is critical for US/China relations, and for Asia, that the US is not held to blame. "If there's a breakdown, China must stay on our side!" On Iran, Scowcroft sees a very different dynamic, given the pro-active role of the Europeans. The US must actively support the Euros, and not just say it won't object to others giving Iran inducements.

I have my own thoughts about this important discussion which I will post after I satisfy the demands for transcripts coming from all the networks, wire services, and print media.

But for other TWN readers, the transcripts will be finished today and posted on the site hopefully before the close of business today.

-- Steve Clemons

My lawyer friend BG, whom I hope will one day be a Senator from a red state, sent this interesting note on the legal precedent of Congress's right to know the content of Gonzales's secret memos:

The following is from a 1941 opinion issued by Robert Jackson when he was Attorney General. Jackson, who had previously served as Solicitor General and later went on to be a Supreme Court Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor, probably understood the need to protect executive branch deliberations better than anyone. And his concurring opinion in Youngstown Sheet and Tube Company v. Sawyer (1952) is probably the most influential judicial statement on the separation of powers doctrine. Therefore, his views on this topic seems highly relevant.

The same should be true for the White House and Gonzales's memoranda.

I concur.

I hope someone can get this tidbit up to staffers today at the Gonzales hearings.

-- Steve Clemons

Tomorrow (Thursday), I have organized a meeting in the U.S. Senate for an eclectic group of foreign policy thinkers, writers, and activists. Although we have about 50 people attending, I am working with a number of collaborators to try and prop up some worthy new thinking in the foreign policy sandbox and to get more progressive and centrist thinkers pulling partly the same way.

To kick things off, I have asked former National Security Advisors Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski to share their thoughts on what they think a road map for American engagement with the world ought to look like.

As I have written previously, I was quite taken by both Brzezinski's and Scowcroft's respective op-eds highlighting new opportunities for America's efforts in the Middle East, in Transatlantic relations, and elsewhere. I am attaching both op-eds as a file here.

What is really interesting though is that I'm pretty sure that tomorrow will be Brent Scowcroft's first public, on-the-record comments since his tenure as Chairman of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board was not continued, as most had expected would be the case.

Some are saying that Scowcroft was "fired" by Bush for his disloyal comments -- but Scowcroft's staff are reporting that his appointment was not renewed. The bottom line is that with Scowcroft outside the bounds of Bush's informal and formal control, there are no remaining senior former Bush I loyalists in Bush II's inner circle -- and Brent Scowcroft may be freer to speak right now.

Sidney Blumenthal masterfully describes Bush's purge of those who question his infallibility in this piece in the Guardian:

The transition to President Bush's second term, filled with backstage betrayals, plots and pathologies, would make for an excellent chapter of I, Claudius.

The elder Bush's national security adviser was the last remnant of traditional Republican realism permitted to exist within the administration.

And Chris Nelson follows up with his own version of the 'totality' of the purge in his newsletter, The Nelson Report. Here is the preamble to his piece:

BUSH CONTINUES DISSENT PURGES...
SCOWCROFT LOST TO INTEL BOARD

SUMMARY: technically, it is true that neither Secretary of State Powell nor former National Security Advisor Scowcroft have been "fired" from their positions. Technically.

Being right is the kiss of death, it turns out. From now on, there will be, by design, no adult supervision.

I will report on what General Scowcroft and Dr. Brzezinski share with us tomorrow as well as with good notes, and my own comments on the ensuing discussion.

-- Steve Clemons

Last night, I read through an interesting set of papers prepared by the left-lurching Institute for Policy Studies. One of the papers, the titles of which I don't have with me here at my neighborhood Starbucks (but will post later), was about the "true costs of the Iraq War." The other proposed a "unified security budget for the United States." I found both papers intriguing -- though my own politics are actually more conservative than the writers of these interesting papers. But the approach each took was quite impressive.

What the paper on the true costs of the Iraq War missed though was that there has developed a "politics of distraction" which has created many other such costs for the nation. Speculating about alternative futures, or presents, is complicated but necessary when thinking about the opportunities costs of actions taken and not taken.

For instance, if America had not allowed so many of its defense-related financial and military resources to become bogged down in Iraq and the Middle East, my hunch is that we would be engaged in more vigorous confrontation with China. The Chinese leadership realizes this as well and thus has many incentives to do whatever it can to covertly supply reasons for America to remain distracted with Iraq and the Middle East problem that we now own. That doesn't make China good, or bad -- but it's the smart thing for China to attempt.

Alternatively, America's distraction with Iraq and U.S. foreign policy has diverted the gaze of the nation from other very important issues. In theory, the number of issues that this war has distracted us from could be infinite, but I believe that there are some biggies. To the degree that one agrees with this argument, the opportunities lost in many other spheres need to be added to the long list of financial costs and to the human lives ended and shattered by this war.

One area where I think that this is happening is in broadband deployment and information technology investment and innovation in the United States.

We entered an information age a while back -- and blogging is part of that -- but now the rate of new opportunities seems to be decreasing as the ecosystem supporting risk-taking innovators is being choked off by anti-competitive, monopolistic Baby Bells.

George Bush, it seems to me, is either paying no attention to his FCC Chairman's paternalism towards the Baby Bells and the inaction of the anti-trust division of the Justice Department, or he is complicit in the foreclosing of America's information technology leadership and future.

This article in USA Today captures one dimension of the battle between the Bells and local communities who are trying to invest in local infrastructure on behalf of their citizens and companies.

Here are the lead grafs:

To hear BellSouth talk, high-speed fiber lines are the way of the future. So why is it so determined to stop Lafayette, La., a rural community in the heart of Cajun country, from installing its own fiber?

Critics say the Bells' efforts are an attack on competition and that consumers could be the big losers.

The financial and political costs to America if telecom competition erodes further and Baby Bells are permitted to carve out spheres of impenetrable control and influence will be staggering.

As far as I'm concerned, while the President is off being a "War President," he is neglecting vital issues at home.

America needs competition in the telecommunications sector, but Michael Powell and his staff are looking for their next job by giving favors to the firms undoing America's IT ecosystem.

-- Steve Clemons

Iraq Prime Minister Allawi knows his town and cautioned a handful of red and blue state senators to move out of harm's way near the window of his own office.

This appeared in today's Washington Times:

Nowhere is safe

It was during a private meeting at the offices of interim Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi that Mr. Allawi told the senators to move their chairs away from the window -- for fear an insurgent sniper might take aim at the American scalps.

-- Steve Clemons

I can think of dozens of highly placed Republicans who could have been constructive participants in the secret Kofi Annan counseling session.

Warren Hoge disclosed the December 5 meeting today in a New York Times report. If anyone hears who leaked the story to him, let me know.

I have the privilege of knowing many of those at the meeting. Famous anti-Vietnam War journalist and former Council on Foreign Relations President Leslie Gelb was there. And the meeting was held in the apartment of Richard Holbrooke, whose wife is a board member of the New America Foundation.

My old UCLA friend, Robert Orr -- who is married to former Chief of Staff to Vice President Gore Audrey Choi -- worked both as aide-de-camp to Richard Holbrooke at the State Department and United Nations and then headed the Washington Office of the Council on Foreign Relations -- thus working for Les Gelb. Today, Bob works for Kofi Annan as Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations for Strategic Planning.

John Ruggie, who used to have Orr's role was there at the December 5th meeting. Former U.S. Senator from Colorado and United Nations Foundation President Tim Wirth and his right-hand staff member and former AOL Time-Warner Foundation Chief Kathy Bushkin were both there. Nader Mousavizadeh, a former UN staff member and now at Goldman Sachs, was there. He is the only one in the meeting I don't have the privilege of knowing.

However, while I completely agree with their effort to bolster the United Nations, particularly as it initiates a reform process and agree generally with the good counsel they provided Annan -- particularly that the U.N. cannot be seen as being at war with the Bush administration and hope to survive long -- the group meeting Annan should have been more politically diverse.

Many Republicans believe that America and the Bush administration need the U.N. to achieve many of America's national objectives, and it would be smart of Annan to find areas of common cause with the White House, despite their many differences.

But the room should have included people like outgoing Republican Congressman and former Corning CEO Amo Houghton, or any of a number of Brent Scowcroft's good staff, or perhaps a senior foreign policy advisor to Senator Chuck Hagel. There are numerous Republicans who think that the breach between the White House and United Nations needs to be bridged.

I don't know who initiated the meeting -- maybe Holbrooke, or perhaps it was Orr and Ruggie operating together to bring their co-shared former bosses into the same room.

Their objectives were correct, despite the demonization of Holbrooke this morning on Fox News. However, the next secret meetings should be smarter secret meetings.

Fellow-traveler Republicans need to be included, and it needs to be remembered by this smart troupe of foreign policy hands that such high profile secret meetings usually do end up having the light of day shine in.

-- Steve Clemons

Frank Rich captures the point I have been trying for some time to make.

People are dying in this war in Iraq, and soldiers on the front line are making sacrifices -- but our nation, while it has reelected this President and thus assured that this war would continue -- does not feel like a nation making choices in time of war. We are not being asked to make major sacrifices to support our troops or our military; we are not turning over our productive capacity to help speed the protection of auto armor; and we are still sitting on our tax cuts.

From Rich's article:

Ordinary people beyond Washington, red and blue Americans alike, are feeling that disconnect more and more. On the same day that CBS broadcast the Kennedy Center special, an ABC News/Washington Post poll found that 70 percent of Americans believed that any gains in Iraq had come at the cost of "unacceptable" losses in casualties and that 56 percent believed the war wasn't "worth fighting" - up 8 percent since the summer. In other words, most Americans believe that our troops are dying for no good reason, even as a similar majority (58 percent) believes, contradictorily enough, that we should keep them in Iraq.

So the soldiers soldier on, and we party on. As James Dao wrote in The New York Times, "support our troops" became a verbal touchstone in 2004, yet "only for a minuscule portion of the populace, mainly those with loved ones overseas, does it have anything to do with sacrifice." Quite the contrary: we have our tax cuts, and a president who promises to make them permanent. Such is the disconnect between the country and the war that there is no national outrage when the president awards the Medal of Freedom to the clowns who undermined the troops by bungling intelligence (George Tenet) and Iraqi support (Paul Bremer). Such is the disconnect that Washington and the news media react with slack-jawed shock when one of those good soldiers we support so much speaks up at a town hall meeting in Kuwait and asks the secretary of defense why vehicles that take him and his brothers into battle lack proper armor.

THE ARMY WE (DON'T) NEED

The New York Times disappoints me with this editorial today.

Because the editors note that "four out of 10 Americans now serving in Iraq come from Reserve or National Guard units," they go on to argue that:

Washington needs to increase its recruitment quotas sharply for active-duty service in the Army and Marine Corps. The current Army recruitment ceiling of just above 500,000 ought to go up to nearly 600,000, still substantially below the levels of the late 1980's.

The Marines' ceiling should go up from the current 178,000 to around 200,000. Attracting those recruits will require offering financial and other inducements on top of the added payroll costs.

The Times is wrong on this. We are short on people today because we committed a great number of troops to an alarmingly sticky morass in Iraq. They make this point themselves in the editorial, but then argue that the answer is more troops, rather than bringing an end to our deployment abroad.

George Bush's biggest error was that he showed the world America's limits -- and thus, as the New York Times points out, the U.S. is vulnerable in other arenas as nations know that now is the time to get away with bad stuff. There is little we can do to rebuff bad behavior elsewhere today, whether it is in Russia, Iran, North Korea, China, Africa, and so on.

The answer is not to make the nation's problem larger by building an ever larger military, but rather by facing up to the errors we have committed now, and pull back troops so that the country is prepared to deal with contingencies and problems that may yet unfold elsewhere.

TOM DELAY'S SLEAZY FRIENDS

This should be read on disgusting and corrupt behavior by Tom DeLay buddies Jack Abramoff and Michael Scanlon about their lobbying on behalf of Indian tribes.

From the article on their internal emails:

Even as the two fast-talking political brokers banked large profits for three years of minimal labor, it was found, they were exchanging gleeful private messages mocking tribal leaders as "morons," "troglodytes" and "monkeys." "I want all their MONEY!!!" Mr. Scanlon exuberantly e-mailed in the midst of one deal.

Mr. Hastert, if you make life easier for Mr. DeLay, you deserve his fate.

-- Steve Clemons

A TWN reader just directed my attention to a very clever roster of New Year's resolution wishes that ran as the lead editorial in today's Los Angeles Times.

Let me share just a few of the many items that the LA Times editorial writers would like to see in 2005:

** We wish President Bush would fire Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld for his disastrous lack of judgment throughout the 18-month Iraq occupation. But we'll settle for more troops, more armor and an exit plan.

** We wish the courts would strike down all further attempts to introduce creationism and "intelligent design" as part of the curriculum in public schools. We'll settle for nothing less.

The list includes a lot of other items, some very funny. I have to admit I like the LA Times editors' "wishful thinking."

I have enjoyed getting the Los Angeles Times national edition in Washington and am disappointed that the paper is pulling the plug on national distribution.

The paper tried this a few years ago, when I worked in the Senate, and I called then Los Angeles Times Chief Editor Shelby Coffey and former Chairman & CEO Robert Erburu groveling and begging them to keep distributing the LA Times in Washington. I don't know if I had any influence, but a couple of days after my talks with Erburu and Coffey, the LA Times reversed its decision.

But this time, I think it's final.

Nonetheless, to the editorial writers at the Times, great editorial today.

-- Steve Clemons

Josh Marshall has an interesting post today on asset-building. He is praising Harold Ford, Jr. (D-TN-9) for his work on an asset-building effort called the "ASPIRE ACT."

I just wanted to add mention of my colleagues Ray Boshara and Reid Cramer at the New America Foundation who were the policy entrepreneurs who actually launched this policy effort and got Representatives Ford, Patrick Kennedy (D-RI-1), Thomas Petri (R-WI-6), and Phil English (R-PA-3) as well as Senators Rick Santorum (R-PA) and John Corzine (D-NJ) to support this savings accounts for kids proposal (started with an initial kick-in from the government of $500).

Tony Blair's team at No. 10 in London were so entranced with Ray Boshara's proposal that the U.K. became the first nation to apply his asset-building concept in the form of "Baby Bonds."

I think Ray's proposal is modest in scope but begins to focus attention on the asset disparities at birth in this country. And in this time of heated partisanship, it is laudable that Ray and his team have secured support on both sides of the aisle -- even from Rick Santorum, even him.

In any case, check out Ray Boshara's "Asset Building" home page. There are some very interesting proposals here.

-- Steve Clemons