This may be one of the most depressing interviews I have read since the start of the Obama Administration. (And it will get worse later today — I have seen clips from a similar performance on NBC’s Meet the Press; we’re waiting for the full video and transcript.) The White House, amidst the political complexity of this week’s events in Afghanistan, put up two military men — Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, and the US Ambassor to Afghanistan, General Karl Eikenberry — for set-up questions from John King.
The political knowledge in this exchange is almost vacant, with the platitudes about “democracy” (note Eikenberry’s excited spin that he couldn’t get the indelible ink off his finger) substituting for the serious issues about the election — today, there are reports that the declaration of the vote may be delayed because of fraud allegations — and the politics beyond it.
Instead the conversation turns to militarising the US involvement, with the question, “How many more troops?” And, of course, this is all rationalised by skipping over the Afghan people and referring to “Al Qa’eda” (who, I’ll note for the record, are not in Afghanistan but in another country).
KING: This is the “State of the Union” report for Sunday, August 23rd.
In Afghanistan today, both President Hamid Karzai and his top challenger are claiming victory in last week’s election, raising tensions, even though it could be weeks or more before the official results are certified. It is an uncertain military situation, as well, with fighting between U.S. forces and the Taliban intensifying. And fresh indications President Obama could soon be asked to commit more American troops.
Here to talk about this and other global challenges are the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen , and the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Karl Eikenberry. He joins us from Kabul.
And Mr. Ambassador, let me start with you. There are complaints, escalating complaints this Sunday about fraud in the elections. On the threshold question of will this balloting be credible, what is your answer?
EIKENBERRY: Well, John, it was an extraordinary two months that we’ve been through, with this being a very historic election. Afghanistan, the first time in the past 30 years that the Afghan people have led an election for their president, for provincial councils, very intense campaign that occurred over the last two months, all new in Afghanistan. Presidential televised debates, campaign rallies. A very civil debate that occurred over this time. Read the rest of this entry »
We don’t like our evil to be banal. Ten years after Columbine, it only now may be sinking in that the psychopathic killers were not jock-hating dorks from a “Trench Coat Mafia,” or, as ABC News maintained at the time, “part of a dark, underground national phenomenon known as the Gothic movement.” In the new best seller “Columbine,” the journalist Dave Cullen reaffirms that Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris were instead ordinary American teenagers who worked at the local pizza joint, loved their parents and were popular among their classmates.
On Tuesday, it will be five years since Americans first confronted the photographs from Abu Ghraib on “60 Minutes II.” Here, too, we want to cling to myths that quarantine the evil. If our country committed torture, surely it did so to prevent Armageddon, in a patriotic ticking-time-bomb scenario out of “24.” If anyone deserves blame, it was only those identified by President Bush as “a few American troops who dishonored our country and disregarded our values”: promiscuous, sinister-looking lowlifes like Lynddie England, Charles Graner and the other grunts who were held accountable while the top command got a pass. Read the rest of this entry »
HOST JOHN KING: General Petraeus, let me start with the threshold question for you, how many troops will it take? How long will it be.
PETRAEUS: Well, as you know, John, the president and President Bush before him have set in motion orders for troops that will more than double the number that were on the ground at the beginning of the year. We’ll get those on the ground. We’ll take a lot of effort with infrastructure, logistics and so forth, start employing those in the months that lie ahead. They’ll all be on the ground by the end of the summer and the early fall.
And along the way we’ll be doing the assessments. And among those assessments, of course, will be the kinds of questions about force levels, about additional civilians and other resources as well.
KING: General McKiernan, your commander on the ground, had been up-front that he needed even more troops. Why did the president say no?
It’s a non-story because, as we reported last week, the Pentagon have been steadily leaking this information. More significant is Mullen’s red-meat warning, “When we get additional troops here, I think the violence level is going to go up. The fight will be tougher.”
In other words, get ready for the long haul, folks. And forget any namby-pamby talk about a political approach or, heaven help us, a negotiated way out of this mess. This is a head-on military confrontation.
Just before the election, Enduring America passed on some inside information about John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin as his Vice-Presidential nominee. Apparently, it was a last-minute choice when McCain advisors blocked the selection of Joe Lieberman. The somewhat bizarre twist was that Palin came to attention in part because of Republican Party activists, notably those behind the aggressive foreign policy of the Bush years, who met her while on cruises in the Alaskan fjords.
Well, well: looks like we were on the mark. The investigative journalist Jane Mayer has now laid out more of the story on Democracy Now!.
There’s an additional postscript that Mayer doesn’t note. Apparently Randy Scheunemann, one of McCain’s foreign policy advisors, was fired from the campaign. The allegation is that he was leaking information to Palin about some of the opposition to her amongst other McCain staffers.
Significance? Scheunemann is a long-time foreign policy pal of the activists — loosely, sometimes inaccurate known as “neo-conservatives” — who were gung-ho for the Iraq War. Indeed, Scheunemann was at the head of the Committee to Liberate Iraq, formed in 2002. Before that, he had been part of the Project for a New American Century, signing their letter on 20 September 2001 to President Bush calling for swift action against terrorism, including regime change in Iraq.
Scheunemann has thus been in the same circles and shared the same outlook as William Kristol. Far from coincidentially — at least in my book — it is Kristol who has been Palin’s biggest public cheerleader via his columns at the New York Times. And it is Kristol who was the channel for Palin’s charge that McCain wasn’t being negative enough on Obama, for example, bringing out the Illinois Senator’s connections with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright.
Amy Goodman: No matter who wins the White House November 4th, a group of prominent conservatives are planning to meet the next day in Virginia to discuss the way forward for the movement. And regardless of the outcome, Governor Sarah Palin will be high on the agenda. The New York Times reports if John McCain loses the election, Palin could emerge as a standard bearer for the conservative movement and a potential presidential candidate in 2012, albeit one who will need to address her considerable political damage.
Most Americans had never heard of Sarah Palin when McCain first announced her as his running mate back in August. Her national debut came at the Republican Party’s convention in St. Paul, where she sought to cast herself as an antidote to the elitist culture inside the Beltway.
Gov. Sarah Palin: I’m not a member of the permanent political establishment, and I’ve learned quickly these last few days that if you’re not a member in good standing of the Washington elite, then some in the media consider a candidate unqualified for that reason alone.
AG: Governor Palin’s sudden rise to prominence, however, owes more to members of the Washington elite than her rhetoric suggests. That’s according to an article in The New Yorker magazine by investigative reporter Jane Mayer. It’s called “The Insiders: How John McCain Came to Pick Sarah Palin.” Jane Mayer now joins us in Washington, D.C.
Welcome to Democracy Now!, Jane.
Jane Mayer: Hi, thanks. Good to be with you.
AG: It’s good to have you with us. Why don’t you tell us the story of the cruises to Alaska?
JM: The cruises. Well, Juneau, Alaska turns out to be a major stop for cruise ships that come through Alaska, and there are political cruises, in particular, that are run by the conservative political magazines that stop there. And so, when Sarah Palin was elected governor, she learned that a number of those Washington insider elite members of the media would be trooping through Juneau. And despite the rhetoric that she’s got that is about, you know, sort of deriding them and saying she doesn’t, you know, seek their approval, in fact, she invited most of them to lunch and to other receptions that she threw. She even brought some up on a helicopter ride to go see a couple sites in Alaska.
So, she was courting some of those Washington insiders. In particular, they were the pundits that work for the Weekly Standard magazine, which is Rupert Murdoch’s conservative political magazine, and the National Review, the old conservative magazine founded by William F. Buckley. So she made a great impression on some of these pundits when they came through. They enjoyed their lunches and receptions and went back and wrote fabulous stories about her, and this was one of the things that really got the ball rolling for her.
This may be one of the most depressing interviews I have read since the start of the Obama Administration. (And it will get worse later today — I have seen clips from a similar performance on NBC’s Meet the Press; we’re waiting for the full video and transcript.) The White House, amidst the political complexity of this week’s events in Afghanistan, put up two military men — Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, and the US Ambassor to Afghanistan, General Karl Eikenberry — for set-up questions from John King.
Frank Rich in The New York Times
HOST JOHN KING: General Petraeus, let me start with the threshold question for you, how many troops will it take? How long will it be.
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