Latest Video: Do We Care about the Obama Bow?

On Wednesday night, ABC's Nightline programme asked, "We ask you, was it a bow and do you care?"

Yes and yes! And a big wag of the finger at the radicals of The Huffington Post, who tried to distract us, "Other conservatives didn't make a peep about the proximity of the Bush family and King Abdullah for the past eight years but now, seemingly, are filled with outrage over a symbolic gesture of respect."

Let's get back to the real story. Here's the very dramatic exchange at Thursday's White House press briefing --- how long can irrelevancies about "the economy" hold back the impeachment of the President?

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxcJVoTNCAk[/youtube]

Scott Lucas in The Guardian: Petraeus v. Obama

Our coverage of the battle within the Obama Administration over Iraq and Afghanistan strategy reached The Guardian last night with Scott Lucas' analysis of the President's plans and General David Petraeus's manoeuvres:

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HOW MANY TROOPS IS ENOUGH?
General David Petraeus is subtly challenging President Obama's views on the number of US troops needed in Afghanistan

In the weeks after Barack Obama's inauguration, there was a running battle within his administration over the president's foreign policy. General David Petraeus, the former commander of US forces in Iraq, now the head of the military's Central Command, was pressing – often publicly – for a slower drawdown of troops in Iraq and a larger surge of US soldiers in Afghanistan.

With the compromise over an Iraq timetable and Obama's recent announcement of the Pakistan-Afghanistan strategy consensus seemed to have emerged. In fact, Petraeus had won quiet victories. A loose definition of "non-combat forces" meant tens of thousands of American troops could remain in Iraq after September 2010. While headlines said Obama had approved an extra 17,000 troops in Afghanistan, the boost was actually 30,000, the amount that military commanders had been seeking. No wonder Petraeus appeared alongside Obama envoy Richard Holbrooke on political talkshows to promote the plan.

Everything all right then?

No.

Last week, Petraeus was back on the attack. He told congressmen on Capitol Hill that "American commanders have requested the deployment of an additional 10,000 US troops to Afghanistan next year, [although] the request awaits a final decision by President Obama this fall."

The general couldn't have been clearer: if you want his solution in Afghanistan, then the president's recent announcement was only an interim step. As Ann Scott Tyson put it in the Washington Post: "The ratio of coalition and Afghan security forces to the population is projected through 2011 to be significantly lower than the 20 troops per 1,000 people prescribed by the army counterinsurgency manual [Petraeus] helped write."

How brazen, even defiant, is this? Consider that, only three days earlier, the president had tried to hold the line against precisely this "bit more, bit more, OK, a bit more" demand. He said he had "resourced properly" the Pakistan-Afghanistan strategy and had pre-emptively warned his generals: "What I will not do is to simply assume that more troops always result in an improved situation … There may be a point of diminishing returns."

In the congressional hearings, Michele Flournoy, the undersecretary of defence, insisted that the US plan was to concentrate forces in "the insurgency belt in the south and east", rather than throughout Afghanistan, as Petraeus preferred, and tried to signal that there would be upward shifts in deployments: "Troops would arrive, as planned, in 2010."

Still, even as Obama was travelling to Europe to get Nato's support for his approach, Petraeus was subtly challenging his president. Both are invoking an al-Qaieda threat against the US and the world as the call for action. Both are setting the disruption of the Pakistani safe havens as an immediate US objective.

The president sees "a comprehensive strategy that doesn't just rely on bullets or bombs, but also relies on agricultural specialists, on doctors, on engineers", an inter-agency approach with increased economic aid, including a trebling to $1.5bn per year for Pakistan, and a boost in civilian workers.

For Petraeus "comprehensive", even if it must have non-military as well as military dimensions, means an effort led by the Pentagon in both Afghanistan and Pakistan. Military commanders have steadily taken over non-military programmes, including information operations and economic development, from other agencies. (In last week's hearings, the general announced a Pakistani Counterinsurgency Capability Fund of $3bn, taking responsibility for security assistance from the US state department.)

Even more importantly, Obama has left open the possibility that if the military approach runs into trouble, then it will be reconsidered: "[This is] not going to be an open-ended commitment of infinite resources." He even broke the taboo of the v-word last Sunday: "I'm enough of a student of history to know that the United States, in Vietnam and other countries, other epochs of history have overextended to the point where they were severely weakened."

In contrast, the prospect of an increase of violence only reinforces Petraeus's rationale to put more soldiers into the conflict. The general's acolytes in counterinsurgency are already writing of up to 100,000 US troops in Afghanistan. An expansion of aerial and covert operations in northwest Pakistan is underway.

Obama's announced strategy may be muddled. It lacks any approach to, and even understanding of, the politics in Islamabad and Kabul, and its default position of airstrikes in northwest Pakistan is likely to bolster rather than vanquish the safe havens for the Afghan insurgency. Petraeus's campaign, however, only escalates the dangers.

In mid-February, the president called the US commander in Afghanistan, General David McKiernan, and asked how the general planned to use an extra 30,000 troops. According to a White House official, Obama "got no coherent answer to the question".

What we are witnessing goes beyond the egos and aspirations of two intelligent, confident American leaders. And it is beyond the dreaded v-word of the 1960s or the contrasting myth of Petraeus' successful Iraq surge.

This is the tension of what the historian Marilyn Young labels the "limited unlimited war". Even as President Obama sets aside the phrase "global war on terror", he frames this particular intervention in the terms of the ongoing battle against Osama bin Laden and his extremist allies. Doing so, he leaves himself open to the vision of Petraeus, for whom the counterinsurgency operation never quite reaches an end.

Muammer Qaddafi and the "Assassination Plot" against Barack Obama

Although it was emphasised that the President was not in an immediate danger, the Secret Service in Washington stated on Monday that a man who was plotted to kill Barack Obama had been arrested by the Turkish National Police two days before the President came to Turkey. According to the Saudi newspaper Al Watan, the suspect of Syrian descent confessed that he wanted to stab Obama with a knife.

In response to reports that the man in custody was carrying a press card of Al Jazeera,  the network's bureau chief in Ankara, Yucef al-Sharif, stated that the suspect had almost certainly forged the card as the Turkish security services knew everyone who worked in Al-Jazeera’s Ankara office.

So up to now, this plot seemed to be simply that of an extreme individual, just as it had with  four people were arrested in August 2008 on suspicion that they wanted to harm Obama. However, we may now have word that the assassination attempt is a new and ‘deep’ point of view to ‘shed light into Obama’s inauspiciousness’.

The source? Libya’s Muammer Qaddafi.

He said  that “Obama is a flicker of hope in the middle of the imperialist darkness,” so he feared that the President, whose “political discourse has been reasonable so far, breaking with the arrogance that was prevalent in statements by former US presidents”, could be assassinated.  Qaddafi points to the shootings of Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King as historical examples.

Could it be that a Libya that gave up its clandestine weapons of mass destruction programs, put an end to its missile threat to  US bases in the Mediterranean, and paid compensation to the families of the Lockerbie victims  --- and who, in return, succeeded in getting US and international sanctions lifted --- is guarding against intensifying criticism of its ‘undemocratic’ regime?

Or is Qaddafi just being a concerned citizen of the world?

Obama Bows Down to Saudi King! The Controversy Continues....

Latest Post: Video Alert - Obama Does Not Bow to Saudi King

This blog entry should be considered a very important update on a very important event. In no way should it be seen as a shameless reminder that we have the video of the Obama bow/non-bow to Abdullah.

Full credit to my colleague Ali Yenidunya, who broke the story last Thursday of President Obama's bow of greeting to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and wrote ominously, "One thing we do know is that a younger Muslim always shows utmost respect to an older Muslim in public and is expected to kiss the latter’s hands. Hmm, we should think more about it."

Ali did get the Internet, or at least the right-thinking portion of it, moving.

His challenge, "It is time for Conservapedia to take some action," has been met. Our favourite on-line encyclopedia has updated its entry for Barack Hussein Obama, "Never before in the history of the U.S. has a president displayed such shocking deference to a foreign official."

The Weekly Standard initially fretted, "There’s [a] fawning you’ll never, ever know anything about and that is President Obama’s grovel before Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz of the House of Saud," but a few days later, everyone was a-flutter about it (perhaps because The Weekly Standard kept banging on). Heck, even Camille Paglia wrote about it, and apparently she was a really important writer once upon a time.

But now the dramatic revelation: none of this happened. A White House aide says, ""It wasn't a bow. [President Obama] grasped his hand with two hands, and he's taller than King Abdullah."

A Beginners' Guide to Engagement with Iran

Related Post: US, Iran in Nuclear Talks

As news emerges that the Obama Administration has agreed to join direct talks with Iran over its nuclear programme, Peter Jones offers this "diplomatic primer" in Foreign Policy. Jones, an associate professor at the University of Ottawa, is a former official in the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade and the office of the national security advisor to the Canadian Prime Minister.

HOW TO NEGOTIATE WITH IRAN

The various messages and statements floating back and forth between the United States and Iran since the election of U.S. President Barack Obama signal one of the few moments since 1979 when a real warming of the relationship may be possible.

It's unclear, of course, whether the United States and Iran will sit down anytime soon for public and open negotiations. And the prospect of Obama meeting Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, let alone Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, seems very remote. Nor would the mere existence of a serious dialogue at any level guarantee that the many issues that divide the two countries can be resolved satisfactorily. Still, the United States at this moment must think hard about how to negotiate with Iran, should the day come.

During the past 14 years, I've visited Iran more than a dozen times, both to attend conferences as an academic and to take part in diplomatic discussions as a Canadian official. During this time, I've learned some hard lessons about how to negotiate with Tehran, even on sensitive issues such as security. I've also seen the crippling mistakes that many Western countries, including the United States, make in their understanding of the Iranian body politic. Here is my advice -- on the whom, the how, and the what of talking with Tehran.

First: whom. The Iranian political scene is an extraordinarily diffuse beast. There are many power centers and many players, all perpetually locked in intense competition. Western analysts often refer to "reformists," "traditional conservatives," "technoconservatives," "radicals," and others. But, in all my time in Iran I have never heard these terminologies used by Iranians themselves. A continuum, akin to the leftist-Democrat-centrist-Republican-rightist one in the United States, is not appropriate. For, in reality, the Iranian political scene is highly fluid, with coalitions continuously forming and reforming. Iranians' understanding of their political universe simply does not accord with Westerners' understanding.

Because a significant portion of the debate over how to approach the Iranians concerns which factions to approach and how to do it, this misunderstanding bears significant consequences. A long process of engaging Iran at multiple levels lies in store if Westerners are to better understand the internal situation. After 30 years of isolation from Iran, analysts and officials in the West have a lot of catching up to do.

Western analysts must also recognize that the president is far from the most important figure in Iranian politics, whatever Ahmadinejad's rhetoric may suggest. Even the supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, is not all-powerful. Rather, he acts to preserve the delicate political balance, while subtly pushing his own agenda. The supreme leader can be difficult for outsiders to reach. Former Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Velayati runs a foreign-policy machine for the supreme leader, and that might be one avenue of approach. The most direct is simply for Obama to write directly to Khamenei -- from one "supreme leader" to another.

Second: how. The process of negotiation will surely prove just as important as the substance, at least in the beginning. Discussions with Iranians often take place in an elaborate, formal language, which establishes pecking orders and conveys unspoken messages. Concealment and dissimulation are not regarded as negative behavior, and speaking in broad terms of theory and history is commonplace.

From my own experience, Iranians spend a good deal of time at the beginning of a discussion invoking concepts such as "justice" and "respect" and saying that the Western approach to Iran has traditionally lacked both. But Iranian negotiators are very adept at avoiding the need to define these concepts in concrete terms or linking them to specific policy avenues. This tendency gives the conversation a circular dynamic that can be very frustrating. Faced with this tendency, Western negotiators should patiently and firmly, but also politely, insist that they be provided with practical links between these concepts on the one hand and policy issues on the other -- rather than endless rounds of exchanges over their esoteric meanings.

Western negotiators must also recognize that the stereotypical American style of negotiation -- blunt, direct, transactional -- irks and frustrates Iranians. Iranians fear that abbreviated and quick discussions deprive them of the context and the time they need to situate themselves to what is going on. All this argues for a long-term approach and not one that is linked to the need to "solve" any particular issue according to a unilateral timeline.

Additionally, U.S. diplomats will learn that the Iranians could teach the Chinese a thing or two about "Middle Kingdom" thinking. The Iranians are, justifiably, very proud of their history and culture. Their worldview flows from a sense of being the center of everything (a feeling many Americans share) due to their thousands of years of history. Iran's history also teaches them, not unfairly, that the outside world is usually a source of danger.

Thus, Iranian politicians and diplomats have enormous sensitivity to any sense of losing, or losing face, in any encounter with Westerners -- and especially Americans. In the vicious world of domestic Iranian politics, walking away from a good deal that makes you look weak is far preferable to accepting it. The United States must learn how to work with Iranians to frame solutions to differences in a way palatable to these sensitivities, even as these solutions address U.S. needs. "Track two" diplomacy, talks in unofficial channels, could help foster a conceptual and political framework for "track one" discussions between the governments themselves.

More broadly, both Americans and Iranians must recognize that, even as they seek to address specific issues, dialogue should be about more than political elites making deals. Dialogue, instead, should be about these two great societies coming to terms and developing a real rapprochement. Scholarly, cultural, and sporting contacts will help. Westerners should also bear in mind that it may well be the Iranian leadership that will be most suspicious of these openings, fearing that the revolution could be imperiled by such contacts.

Third: what. Despite the ongoing infighting that marks Iranian politics, a key point for Westerners to bear in mind is that all factions in "mainstream" Iranian politics support the idea that Iran should have the fuel cycle and a nuclear "option." The factions may have differing views on what constitutes an option and what can be traded for it. This may be an area for discussion -- a search for limits to Iran's enrichment program and greater transparency surrounding it.

But U.S. negotiators should be under no illusions. The idea that Iran should have some form of fuel cycle commands broad consensus within its current political system. The reasons why have as much or more to do with a very hardheaded analysis of Iran's security needs as with any ideological questions. It is not a matter of waiting for the present political order to throw up a leader who sees differently. That is not going to happen.

Those on both sides who seek to make the nuclear question the only issue, and who frame it in absolute terms and argue that it must be addressed before anything else can be considered, are not serious. This need to address other matters, even as the nuclear question is discussed, may have the effect of playing into Iran's hands as to the timing of its nuclear program, but it is a reality anyway.

This is not a way of saying that the nuclear issue should be shelved. It is a way of saying that no relationship is one-dimensional. Afghanistan, Iraq, drug smuggling, and others are issues where there can be some common purpose. There are also issues where there will continue to be serious differences, such as Iranian support for Hamas and Hezbollah, and other matters. All of these issues will have to be on the table.

This reality suggests that, ultimately, this will be a long process. Spoilers on both sides will try to sabotage it. Each side will have to carry on in the face of such frustrations. Westerners should also recognize that the presidential elections in June mean that nothing too serious will likely happen before then. It is very important for the West to avoid interfering with that process.

And, finally, U.S. officials must realize that real dialogue, improved relations, and broader rapprochement mean more to Iran's elite than a simple thawing of relations. For Iranian hard-liners, all this heralds the end of a central tenet of the revolution -- that Iran must guard against contamination by, and collaboration with, the decadent West, and especially the United States. The Iranian people want a new relationship with the West. They are tired of being isolated. But in many ways, discussions between Tehran and Washington will be more of a watershed for their leaders than they will be for us.