Rescue workers carry a victim of the earthquake in Sichuan province in China, 15 May 2008 (Ng Han Guan/AP)

Photos of the Decade: 2007 (Bhutto Assassination)

Just a bit of historical reflection, which may or may not be connected with events of today. I suspect a lot of readers and viewers will be familiar with the first of these interviews, in which President John F. Kennedy declared about the conflict in South Vietnam, “In the final analysis, it is their war.”

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I doubt many are familiar with the follow-up, however. A week later, President Kennedy made clear to another interviewer:

What I am concerned about is that Americans will get impatient and say, because they don’t like events in Southeast Asia or they don’t like the Government in Saigon, that we should withdraw. That only makes it easy for the Communists. I think we should stay.

We should use our influence in as effective a way as we can, but we should not withdraw.

2 SEPTEMBER 1963: PRESIDENT KENNEDY WITH WALTER CRONKITE OF CBS

MR. CRONKITE. Mr. President, the only hot war we’ve got running at the moment is of course the one in Viet-Nam, and we have our difficulties here, quite obviously.
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Tags: CBS News, Central Intelligence Agency, Chet Huntley, John F. Kennedy, NBC News, Ngo Dinh Diem, Vietnam, Walter Cronkite

Iran: A Response to “What If the Green Movement Isn’t Ours?” (The Sequel)
Iran: A Response to an American Who Asks, “What if the Green Movement Isn’t ‘Ours’?

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First of all, I must say that I admire and respect Roger Cohen. He has a been a vital asset for the international community in discerning truth from fiction when it came to the ongoing crisis in Iran. However, his recent article in The New York Times angered me not because it is ridiculously flawed – it is not – but because I did not expect Cohen to be so shallow in thought on protest and “revolution”.

In his article, Cohen asks a question that confounded me:

In 1989, the revolutionary year, the Tiananmen Square massacre happened in Beijing and, five months later, the division of Europe ended with the fall of the Wall in Berlin. Could it have been otherwise? Might China have opened to greater democracy while European uprisings were shot down?

We cannot know any more than we know what lies on the road not taken or what a pregnant glance exchanged but never explored might have yielded.

Well, I respectfully beg to differ on the comparison between Eastern Europe and China. We do know: the respective outcomes of the movements in 1989 could not have been otherwise. For what Mr. Cohen fails to mention is that the political situations in China and Eastern Europe were worlds apart.
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Tags: 13 Aban, China, Iran, Iran Elections, Islamic Revolution Guard Corps, Josh Shahryar, Mao Zedong, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mir Hossein Mousavi, New York Times, Roger Cohen

Torture and Lies: Confronting Cheney — 7 More Points to Note
Torture and Lies: Confronting Cheney

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Apologies for not mincing words, but the US in the midst of a sustained public-relations effort to whitewash the torture stain of the Bush Administration by 1) arguing that it wasn’t torture and 2) if it was, it helped win the War on Terror. After the release this week of the damning 2004 CIA internal report on the Administration’s authorisation of torture and its ineffectiveness, Dick Cheney has been at the front of the campaign to save his legacy, if not America’s standing in the world. Fox News set him with the softball questions this morning.

(An important side note for Iran-watchers. Check out the passage late in the transcript where Cheney comes out as a strong supporter of an airstrike on Iran in 2007-8):

CHRIS WALLACE, HOST: Mr. Vice President, welcome back to “FOX News Sunday.”

RICHARD CHENEY, FORMER VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: It’s good to be back, Chris.

WALLACE: This is your first interview since Attorney General Holder named a prosecutor to investigate possible CIA abuses of terror detainees.

What do you think of that decision?

CHENEY: I think it’s a terrible decision. President Obama made the announcement some weeks ago that this would not happen, that his administration would not go back and look at or try to prosecute CIA personnel. And the effort now is based upon the inspector general’s report that was sent to the Justice Department five years ago, was completely reviewed by the Justice Department in years past.
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Tags: A Q Khan, Abu Zubaydah, al-Qaeda, Baitullah Mehsud, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Bush Administration, Central Intelligence Agency, Chris Wallace, Dick Cheney, Eric Holder, Fox News Sunday, George W Bush, Health Care, Iran, Justice Department, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Nancy Pelosi, North Korea, Nouri al-Maliki, Obama Administration, Pakistan, Rendition, Ted Kennedy, The Washington Post, Torture

Transcript II: National Security Advisor Jones on North Korea and Pakistan (9 August)
Transcripts III: National Security Advisor Jones on Afghanistan, Pakistan, and North Korea (9 August)

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National Security Advisor James Jones is doing overtime today as the Obama Administration’s foreign policy salesman. He’s been interviewed on three of the top Sunday morning politics chat shows: Meet the Press, Fox News Sunday (transcript in a separate entry), and Face the Nation (transcript in a separate entry). The topics covered are the same: this week’s release of two American journalists from North Korea, the possible assassination of Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud, and engagement with Iran.

And it’s a triple dose of nothingness, with little of significance being said. To be fair to Jones, that’s because of the appalling simplistic media narrative. On North Korea, it’s sentimental “Yay, We Got Americans Out of an Evil Place” vs. “Oh, No, We Cut a Deal to Get Americans Out of an Evil Place”. The Mehsud case becomes a Boy’s Own story of daring American operations (even though no American would have been physically present, even in the air above, when the unmanned drone fired its missile), obscuring the problems in Pakistan that will last beyond — and possibly be magnified — by the killing. And Iran? Both the media and Obama Administration are in the side alley of the nuclear programme issue.

DAVID GREGORY: General James Jones, welcome back to MEET THE PRESS.

GEN. JAMES JONES (RET.): Thank you, sir. Appreciate it.

MR. GREGORY: Big news; North Korea, the two American journalists back home. This was the scene as it played out in Los Angeles on Wednesday, former President Bill Clinton accompanying the two journalists back home. He has since come back east and you have been able to fully debrief him. What can you say you have now learned about North Korea and specifically Kim Jong Il?
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Tags: David Gregory, James Jones, Meet the Press, NBC, North Korea

Video and Transcript I: National Security Advisor Jones on North Korea, Pakistan, Iran (9 August)
Transcripts III: National Security Advisor Jones on Afghanistan, Pakistan, and North Korea (9 August)

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CHRIS WALLACE: General, welcome to “FOX News Sunday.”

JONES: Thank you, Chris. Good to be here.

WALLACE: Is Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Taliban inside Pakistan, dead?

JONES: Well, we think so. The Pakistani government has believed — believes that he is, and all evidence that we have suggests that. But there are reports from the Mehsud organization that he’s not. But we think — we think that it looks like he is.
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Tags: Baitallah Mehsud, Bill Clinton, Chris Wallace, Fox News, Guantanamo Bay, Henry Kissinger, Hillary Clinton, Iran, James Jones, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, North Korea, Obama Administration, Pakistan, Robert Gates, Sir David Richards, Stanley McC, Taliban, War On Terror

Video and Transcript I: National Security Advisor Jones on North Korea, Pakistan, Iran (9 August)
Transcript II: National Security Advisor Jones on North Korea, Pakistan, and Iran

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The transcript of the interview with General James Jones, President Obama’s National Security Advisor, on CBS News’ Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer:

BOB SCHIEFFER: And good morning again, General Jones is in the studio with us this morning.

Thank you very much for coming, General. You went to Afghanistan back in June, you took reporter Bob Woodward along on the trip and afterwards he reported that you told the commanders there they would have to make due with what they had. Yet every day brings a new report that General McChrystal, the top American commander on the ground there, is preparing a new assessment and it appears that he is going to ask for more troops.

We hear that from various people, Anthony Cordesman from CSIS is just back from there. He says we have set impossible goals. We set impossible time frames. He says you are going to have to have more resources.

Are you getting ready to consider putting more troops into Afghanistan?

JONES: We — first of all, it is a pleasure to be with you, thank you very much for having me. The fact is — and I’ll get to my remarks on what the intention was, but the fact is that in March, we announced a very comprehensive strategy that everybody participated in.
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Tags: Anthony Cordesman, Baitullah Mehsud, Bob Schieffer, CBS News, Face the Nation, James Jones, North Korea, Obama Administration, Pakistan, Stanley McChrystal

The headlines may be on the crises and difficulties of engagement from Iran to the Middle East to North Korea, but the Obama Administration is pressing ahead, as an equal or greater priority, with engagement with India and China. Hillary Clinton’s visit to Delhi last week and her co-written editorial with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner in The Wall Street Journal, “A New Strategic and Economic Dialogue with China”, was followed by President Obama’s address on Monday to the first US-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue:

President Obama Attends the U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue from White House on Vimeo.

President Obama’s remarks at the U.S./China Strategice and Economic Dialogue, July 27, 2009

Tags: Barack Obama, China, Hillary Clinton, India, Timothy Geithner, US-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue