Rice and Obama Make Same Statement, Same Time.

Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf quit yesterday under intense domestic and international pressure. What happens now in Pakistan remains to be seen but it was certainly reassuring yesterday to see that all the big players in Washington were on the same page.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice sounded sad to see a “committed partner” go but also looked to the future, remarking that the focus now should be on “Pakistan’s… most urgent needs, including stemming the growth of extremism, addressing food and energy shortages and improving… stability.”

Ah, interesting, because Obama’s statement said almost exactly the same thing, the Senator remarking that the focus now should be on “the urgent issues of today: confronting the threat of extremist violence, dealing with food and energy shortages, and helping the Pakistani people build a stable… future.”

Either they’re sharing a speech writer or someone has been copying in class.

Berlusconi: Soldiers on the Streets Aren’t What Mill Had in Mind.

This month, Italian president Silvio Berlisconi sought to live up to election promises to fight crime by beginning the deployment of 3000 troops onto Italian streets.

Tasked mostly with protecting embassies, transport hubs and tourist attractions, the troops, or so Berlusconi hopes, will reassure Italians that he’s busy dealing with the gypsies, immigrants, and other ghouls his xenophobic government has been active in painting as enemies of the state.

Despite all the racist puff, however, it is hard seeing Berlusconi’s ghouls as much danger to anyone. And even if they were it is pretty clear that, lacking both appropriate equipment and training, soldiers are pretty rubbish at fighting crime

In fact, it is hard to see this move as anything but a distraction from the fact that Berlusconi is busy making himself immune from bribery charges and shutting down the office of the anti-corruption commission - an office that was actually fighting real crime.

When Berlusconi first entered politics he claimed it was because he did not wish to live in an “illiberal country… ruled by immature forces”. I’m not sure what definitions of liberty and maturity he was using but I’m pretty sure the melodrama, racism, and criminality of this current gambit weren’t exactly what John Stuart Mill had in mind.

Whitehouse: Unimportant Forgeries Are No Problem.

As Clive Crook reported this week in the Financial Times, Ron Suskind’s new book “The Way of the World” contains allegations against the Bush Whitehouse of Watergate proportions.

In particular, it is claimed that the Whitehouse asked the CIA to forge a letter from the then Iraqi intelligence chief Tahir Jalil Habbush to then President Saddam Hussein confirming that 9/11 attacker Mohamed Atta had contact with the regime as well as the presence of a covert Iraqi WMD programme.

Whether Suskind’s explosive allegations are proven remains to be seen. What interests me in the meantime is the response of Condoleezza Rice when asked about the allegations: “Look, the United States… the Whitehouse was not going to ask somebody to forge a letter on something of this importance.”

“[O]f this importance”? Is Condi saying they’d have no problems forging letters related to lesser matters? And just how unimportant does something have to be to warrant a Whitehouse forgery? The West Wing catering receipts? Dubya’s IQ test? The cost of war?

This blogger wants to know.

McCain Talks Tough Fastest

This week McCain was sounding tougher than ever on the situation in Georgia, calling Russia an unrepentant combatant against a “brave little nation” and compared Russian “killing” in the “tiny little democracy” to Prague and Budapest in the Cold War. In contrast, McCain supporters in the Senate have been crowing about how slow Obama was to take a hard line, Senator Lindsey Graham arguing that Obama is now “playing catch-up”.

What I don’t understand, however, is how winning points on foreign policy in this campaign has required little more than being the fastest to talk tough.

Things are pretty rubbish for the Georgians right now but surely into the equation of a potential president has to go the need to keep Russia playing nice on a whole host of issues (Iran, energy, NATO etc), issues that might be jeopardised when everyone starts acting like its a Tom Clancy novel.

A bit of Cold War trash talk might sound like experience to some. To me it sounds like McCain is singing a tired old tune.

Stevens Indicted on Corruption Charges, Bush Still Hopeful.

Republican Senator Ted Stevens was indicted yesterday on seven counts of corruption. According to the DOJ, “the indictment charges that while he was sitting as a United States senator between 1999 and 2006, Senator Stevens accepted gifts from a privately held company, known as VECO… an oil field services company.”

An oil company giving gifts to one of the nation’s biggest advocates for drilling in the Arctic Refuge?

While the Grand Jury was in Washington indicting Stevens, President Bush (presumably still hoping to get his own Viking gas grill) was in Ohio, telling the good employees of Lincoln Welding that “In Alaska, in a very small part of that grand state, is the potential to find a lot of oil and gas… and yet, the Congress refuses to allow for there to be exploration in — in this part of the world. And they need to change the law”.

Maybe someone should have told President Bush that the game was up.

Serbian Nationalists Stage “Ghandi-Like” Protests

Radovan Karadzic has now been transferred to The Hague, despite last minute appeals and violent protests by Serbian nationalists in Belgrade.

The protests, in which people brought in from around Serbia wielded stones and burning flares, were no surprise. What puzzles me, however, are the comments of Karadzic’s brother Luka, who claimed the protests would be “Gandhi-like”.

Ghandi-like?

Presumably the non-violence bit was lost in translation.

Obama: The Dr. No of America’s Energy Future?

John McCain delivered some puzzling remarks yesterday in Bakersfield, California.

Segueing neatly between nuclear power and sunscreen, the Arizona Senator paused for a moment to suggest that Obama “is the Dr. No of the America’s energy future. And he also opposes a gas tax holiday as a gimmick.”

The gas tax holiday has been widely written about and widely derided since it was first floated in the primaries. But two of its major flaws are worth rehashing here, just to underline the fact that it is a gimmick, no matter what McCain would have the good citizens of Bakersfield believe.

1. If you’re serious about reducing carbon dioxide emissions and tackling climate change, making it cheaper to drive is absurd.

2. Cutting taxes when supply is inelastic will just cause pre-tax prices to rise, leading to no overall benefit.

And Dr. No? Much as I try, I am having trouble seeing similarities between Obama and the torture-loving, nuclear power-obsessed, missile salesman from Crab Key. Are there other aspects of Ian Fleming’s character of which the public are not aware Senator? Was he involved, perhaps, in Hyde Park politics, before turning to squid-keeping and organised crime? Or are you just hopeful that, like Dr. No, Obama meets a sticky end at the hands of the English?

Berliners Want More Troops in Afghanistan. Really?

By all accounts the good burghers of Berlin loved Obama’s speech last Thursday.

What I can’t understand is why they cheered so much when he called for more German troops in Afghanistan. I mean, it is probably a good idea, but surely they’d have been hurling paving stones if McCain had suggested it.

Or maybe they just didn’t hear him over all the shrieking.

Bush Administration Reduces Risk to Civilians, Strikes Insurgents in Pakistan

If a new plan by the Bush Administration goes ahead this week, 230 million dollars in aid to Pakistan, intended for counter-terrorism, will be shifted to upgrading the state’s ageing fleet of F-16 fighter planes.

State Department officials defended the plan arguing that “the upgrades would greatly enhance the F-16s’ ability to strike insurgents accurately, while reducing the risk to civilians.“

Well that is certainly reassuring.

Although, wasn’t the Israeli Defence Force using F-16s when it “accurately struck” Hamas leader Sheikh Salah Shahada? You know, the time they killed him and twelve others, including eight children. I bet the 120 people who were merely wounded in the missile attack were really pleased about the ability of F-16s to “reduce risk to civilians”.

Anyway, good to see that the Bush Administration is keeping the focus on winning hearts and minds.

Impossible Task for Merrill Executives

This morning’s FT reports that Merrill Lynch is seeking to cut the use of private jets by its senior managing directors.

This is a laudable move but I wonder how it will be possible for those put-upon executives to comply with the firm’s new criteria. According to the FT’s report, they must now “obtain direct clearance from the global head of investment banking to hire one and to demonstrate there is no more efficient means of transport.”

Demonstrate there is “no more efficient means of transport”? Surely this is an impossible task.

At 4.9 tonnes of CO2 per hour (for a Gulfstream 400) I can’t see Merrill’s executives convincing anyone this is more efficient than anything at all, save (perhaps) travelling to their destination on the back of a flatulent wildebeest.

New Yorker Cover: “Tasteless and Offensive”.

Despite a thorough search, no sense of humour was found on either side of American politics yesterday.

I can understand that “irony challenged literalists” are easy to find out in the political hinterland - the LA Times discovering one poster on their political blog who failed “to see the humor in that rag they call a magazine.” so much so, in fact, that he pledged “to never even visit New York, let alone live there.”

What I found more worrying, however, was the speed at which the campaigns themselves leapt to display their own problems with irony, Obama’s camp calling the cover “tasteless and offensive.”

No wonder British comedies have to be remade for American audiences. As Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist, David Horsley said, “It’s like they need a flashing light saying, ‘It’s a joke,’ or they lose the capacity to judge,”

Flip-Flops

To say that flip-flopping is a dirty word in American politics is to state the obvious, particularly after 2004 when Bush flip-flopped and swift-boated his Massachusetts rival into defeat.

It has been no less so in this election with claims of flip-flopping from both sides. Only this week McCain was telling Fox News Channel that “I think there’s been definitely shifts in position, and one of them is Iraq”.

But shouldn’t we be making a distinction between flip-flops that are made because they happen to be politically expedient and those that are the result of reason and reflection on the issues?

We should be worried when a candidate starts flip-flopping on issues that he has stood his ground on before - issues like torture (McCain now won’t rule out water-boarding) and immigration reform (McCain now says fix the border first).

But I am less inclined to agree that there is cause for concern when a candidate remarks that he might “refine” his views based on what happens on the ground, as Obama did last week when asked about Iraq.

Surely a president should be elected for their intelligence, their willingness to listen to the advice of others and for their ability to make the best decision in difficult and complex situations. Changing your mind when the evidence suggests it is the right thing to do isn’t flip-flopping, it is judgement.

Should we applaud the Catholic Church for not flip-flopping when, in its condemnation of Galileo, it stated that “the proposition that the sun is in the center of the world and immovable from its place is absurd, philosophically false, and formally heretical”?

I think not.

G8 Leaders: Let Them Eat Cake.

World leaders gathered in Japan this week for what many have dubbed the “world food shortages summit”. It is hard to know whether those assembled found it odd, or even disturbing that discussions of global food shortages should be interrupted by a four course lunch and then an eight course dinner. We can only speculate as to how many of them were told that their insensitivity to daily hardship was being compared in the media to that of Marie Antoinette. Although I feel sure that many simpering assistants left the “let them eat cake” comparison out of their daily breifings.

This time, at least, I think we can absolve poor Dubya from blame. I’m sure he’d rather be at home eating grits.

Obama Breaks Promise To Accept Public Funds

It is hard to argue that Barak Obama’s June 19 decision to break a promise to accept public funds for his presidential campaign wasn’t pragmatic.

Having raised more than twice as much as John McCain, limiting spending to $84.1 million (as he would have to under public funding rules) would be to throw away an enormous advantage.

But this doesn’t mean he can have it both ways. A banner on his campaign website declares that the system is “broken” and that his is the first campaign “truly funded by the people”.

It is true that a large percentage of his contributors are first time donors giving small amounts, but it is also true that the list includes seventy-nine “bundlers”, five of them billionaires, who have raised at least $200,000 each.

I want Obama to win in November and exploiting his fund-raising advantage to do so is pragmatic. But trying to spin a broken promise as somehow righteous and independent risks treating the electorate like a fool.

Barak Orders Demolition of Dwayat’s East-Jerusalem House

This week, Hussam Dwayat killed three people and injured many more as he rampaged through Jerusalem in a bulldozer. Now Israeli Defence Minister, Ehud Barak, has ordered that the man’s former home be destroyed. 

It goes without saying that Dwayat’s actions were terrible and murderous acts, and completely inexcusable. In response, demolishing his former home might feel like a satisfyingly revengeful thing to do, an eye-for-an-eye kinda thing. It might even give Olmert’s struggling government a little bounce in the polls.

It might. But it is counter-productive and it is illegal.

The relevant parts of International Humanitarian Law talk about a “specific threat” and “military necessity”. They also talk about “collective punishment”. It is hard to see the military necessity behind making homeless the twenty occupants of Dwayat’s former house. It is easy to see that such an action would constitute collective punishment in violation of Article 33 of the fourth Geneva Convention.

In a statement today, Attorney-General Menachem Mazuz said that the proposed demolition “could create legal difficulties, but would not be illegal.” What exactly do you mean Mazuz? That you’re treading the line? That you’re confident of winning should it go to court? Or that you’re stepping out to meet McCain, over in Bullshit town?