On the Contrary

In the last few blogs on the economy I have pointed out how conservative thinking on the economy is outmoded and as a result is the cause of many of the problems we are now facing.  The same is true for our approach to foreign affairs and that was on display during the Russian incursion into Georgia.   John McCain came out with a bellicose, “We are all Georgians” and Sarah Palin with her statement that we might have to confront them militarily.  It is vintage 1980’s stuff that is totally removed from where the world is today.

I have maintained in earlier blogs (”John McCain Experience?” and “Ticking Time Bombs”) that the reaction exhibited by John McCain and the conservatives is cold war thinking that has not evolved as the world has changed.  My contention is that Russia may find, as we did in Iraq, that these kinds of expeditionary adventures are extremely expensive and counter productive.  While the Neocons are seeing Russia as this big monolithic threat that must be met at the door, many others are understanding this will only exacerbate things when a more cool and calculated response will be much more effective.

First and foremost this was an exercise of Russian power near their borders on what they see as an ever-increasing United States threat.  How would you feel if Russia put missiles on our borders as we are doing in Turkey?  Oh, I forgot, they did and it was the Cuban missile crisis.  Secondly have you ever asked yourself what NATO does anymore and wouldn’t you be threatened by the expansion around your borders.  Of course Russia’s move was thuggish although goaded on by Georgia’s imprudent acts in that volatile region.  It is also funded by their oil wealth which we are contributing to.  But the reality is that it was counter productive.  Consider what Fareed Zakaria said on his show GPS:

“From Caucasian countries like Azerbaijan, to Poland and Ukraine, to the Baltic republics, everyone has been rattled by Russia’s behavior, and now seek stronger ties with the West.  Europe and the United States are more united than at any point in two decades. And outside the West, no country in the world has followed Russia and recognized South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

Moscow must be looking at all this and realizing that it has racked up huge costs for little benefit.

If there were to be another cold war, the outcome is preordained. The combined GDP of the West is now $30 trillion. Russia, meanwhile, has an economy that is just under $2 trillion, and that, too, artificially inflated by high oil prices.”

Consider what Tom Friedman (“Hot, Flat, and Crowded”) said in an interview on the same show one week later:

“For me, as someone who opposed NATO expansion at the time, because I felt that it was basically saying to the Russians, look, the Cold War is over for you, but not for us. We’re going to keep pushing our alliance in your face.

At the time they were weak. And at the time, you know, the administration told us, oh, don’t worry. The Russians — they’ll accept it. They’ll get used to it.

Well, guess what. They got strong, and they were never used to it. It was a humiliation. And so, it doesn’t surprise me to see what Putin is doing today.

It’s not an excuse. Putin’s got to get out of Georgia. I think the market’s actually going to punish him a lot more than he realizes and a lot of others realize.”

The bottom line here is that John McCain’s “experienced” response, reflective of the conservative’s view of world politics, is the wrong approach that will simply make things worse.  We need to understand that the Russians have real concerns we need to not just flip off.  Second we need to understand that in a world economy, Russia’s thugism will have negative consequences for the Russians.  The last thing we need to do is start another cold war to reinforce their thugism.  Even more important, we need Russia on our side.  As Tom Friedman put it:

“I looked at the world and I said, is there any problem in the world that we can solve without Russia? Any big problem, whether it’s Iran, Iraq — is there any problem we could solve without Russia?”

Our policy in the future is not reliving the past which is what the conservative Republicans will bring us, but looking for new ways to deal with aggression in a world where that aggression is becoming more and more counter productive as our economies and the welfare of our people are more and more entwined.  Or as Fareed said,

“A calm and deliberate policy toward Moscow is what the world needs, not hysterical overreactions.”

We are not all Georgians.

Sometimes when we are focused on other things, there are stories that tell us a great deal about the current state of affairs and where we are headed.  Sometimes they are seemly irrelevant, but are windows into the heart of many issues.  Here are this weeks tidbits:

➢    The Justice Department’s Inspector General released a couple of reports confirming that for the last couple of years the Justice Department used a litmus test for religious and political beliefs to hire administrative judges in violation of federal law.  Note that the Attorney General felt there was nothing criminal here and a spokesperson for the Justice Department said, “The fact that the process was flawed does not mean that the immigration judges selected through that process are unfit to serve.”  Oh really?  When immigrants applied for asylum, these judges disproportionately rejected these claims.  Let’s see, judges appointed illegally are caring out an immigration policy that raises question about the legality of the whole system.  No, there is no problem here Attorney General Mulcasey.  So these people were hired illegally, others were denied jobs because of their political or eligious affiliation, and looking at the disproportionality or asylum decisions, 157 immigrants who would have been granted asylum were sent home.  No, you are absolutely right, correcting these injustices would open up too many wounds, especially on your Republican brethren.

➢    In the little town of Derby Line, Vermont, they used to mark off the border between Canada and the United States with a painted line on the pavement. Now they have border police trying to watch every crossing and soon there will be a fence.  I wonder if Oklahoma considered a fence on their border to keep Timothy McVey out?  Is this getting stupid or what?  It really is a case of barbarians at the gate

➢    The Pentagon’s intelligence agencies are relying more on polygraph tests and contractors to screen its 5700 prospective and current employees each year.  Maybe there is a role here for Blackwater.  How do you fight a polygraph interpretation?  I would never get hired because they would find out about that stapler I took home in 1982 and forgot to return.

➢    The US continues to show how effective air power is as we employ it against the Taliban in Afghanistan.  In one air strike against the enemy we got 95 of…. well, that’s the question.  The Afghans tells us we got over 50 children.  Collateral damage is a bitch isn’t it?  Is this a great way to fight a war or what? I am sure the Afghans are lining up behind us in droves now

➢    Remember the ugly American.  Well we are losing our lead as Brits and Germans surpass us as our economic and world leadership decline.  In Malia, Greece, as the mayor describes them, “They scream, they sing they fall, down, they take their clothes off, they cross-dress, they vomit.”  In San Francisco, German politicos came on a junket and instead of meeting with their counterparts, shopped, played, drank, and in one case, broke an angle and told the local German Consul, to get them a wheel chair and a n*&^r to push them around.  What is this world coming to when we can’t even be the ugliest tourists anymore?

➢     Al-Qaida (You are right, I spell it different every time I write it, but have no idea which is right) has not focused on expensive terrorist attacks which might mean that our focus on cutting off their funding didn’t stop any attacks.  It appears that most were raising plenty of cash for their activities through common criminal rackets such as drug dealing and credit card theft.  Maybe this whole this is really mostly a police action after all.

➢    In Georgia thousands took to the street in Poti, Georgia to tell the Russians to get out.  It is a new day and the Russians may find that their strongarm tactics may backfire just as the South’s attempt to deny integration marchers back in the 60’s did.  The whole world can see what and who they are as we saw who the segregationists were.  They may find that their tactics will backfire big time in the future.

➢    For those of you that think the war is won in Iraq, out of 151,000 families that had fled their houses in Baghdad, just 7112 had return by mid July according to the Iraqi Ministry of Migration.  If things are so peachy there I wonder why that is?  The sectarian war gets closer and closer.  Tick, tick, tick.

➢    Meanwhile back at the ranch, the citizens of New Orleans are expressing great confidence in the Army Corps of Engineers new flood walls by rebuilding in flood prone areas while experts point out that the protection is less than what they had before Katrina.  It says all you need to know about what short memories we have and how repeating our stupid errors is a habit of choice.

So just a little insight into how well things are going and how little we really understand cause and effect.  That is the only way I make sense out of people who want to continue the Bush legacy with John McMean.

I was watching CNN on Monday trying to find out what was going on in Georgia with the invasion by the Russians and what I got was John McMean looked more Presidential today than Barrack did as he released a get tough paper on Russia.  Let’s see if I have this right:  Russia has invaded Georgia and I, probably like a lot of people in this country, have ignored the politics over there and now I would like to know what the background is that led up to this invasion.  And what I got was an analysis of how this event could work in John McMean’s political favor because he can show off his foreign affairs credentials and a discussion of who looked more Presidential, McMean in suit and tie framed by flags, and Barrack on vacation in Hawaii, in a casual shirt.  The stand-in for Wolfe Blitzer turns to the Republican shill and asks if this doesn’t help McMean.  Does anybody in the nation not know what his answer will be?  This is news? This informs the American public?  Are we really that stupid?

But Keith Olbermann on Countdown actually had someone on his show that knew the history and intimated that we had emboldened the Georgians to provoke the Russians.  It will be interesting to see how this plays out in the next couple of days as we look at our policies in that region and the helpless state we are in right now to do anything about it.  But CNN is showing John McMean with his forceful statement and describing how presidential he looks.  Uh, wait a minute.  Do you guys remember when Barrack went to Europe and the McMean folks were all over him for being presumptuous about acting like a President?  Does it occur to anyone that in a developing crisis maybe we ought to let the President be the President and maybe John McMean was well, being presumptuous, and also undercutting the sitting President?  Oh I am sorry those would be Republican complaints about a Democrat, not an observation about Republicans.

But did our media even notice?  I only witnessed Olbermann pointing out these obvious hypocrisies.  A real press would have informed us of the history that led up to this invasion.  It would have informed us about our arming of the Georgians.  It would have told us about the Georgian’s earlier aggression that started this fray. It would also inform us about the fact that we are powerless to do anything about the current incursion by the Russians because the policies of the Republicans have tied our hands and stripped us of our influence.  The Russians are rich with oil money and they can do just about anything they want.  It is sad to see them reverting to the Soviet Union of old.  But then again we looked in their eyes and knew them to be men of virtue didn’t we?

So while this is going on, the lead stories were of course more discussion of John Edward’s indiscretions, Hillary’s followers threats to disrupt the Democratic convention, and stories about some of the infighting that went on in the Clinton campaign about how to tar Barrack un-American.  I don’t know about you, but I already feel better informed about tax policy (McMean issued an ad that was totally false, but the press was too busy looking under John Edward’s bed to notice), health care, our crumbling infrastructure, a real Iraq policy, what to do in Afghanistan, how to handle our energy future, or what we are going to do about global warming.   Actually what I am better informed about is who made payments to Edward’s girl friend.  Is this a great way to run a country or what?  And we are surprised that the voters continue to make colossally bad choices on their ballots?  Maybe that is why drill, drill, drill sells.  Our press is no longer redeemable.  They are just pretty faces without any gray matter to look beyond the statements of their guests.  Anybody have a blow dryer?

One last thought:  If you look at John McMean’s six point plan for dealing with the Georgia situation (i.e. dealing with Russia), it is the old isolation is punishment approach.  My first reaction was, “Yeah, slap those guys back into place.” But it hasn’t worked in the past and one might wonder if just maybe we need to be engaging them more in the world so they are less estranged and less inclined to act like the old Soviet Union. Another point of view (instead of John McMean’s knee jerk reaction) showed up from ex-President Gorbachev in the Washington Post.  It will make an interesting topic for discussion of policy in the future if we can finally focus on what is important instead of what is salacious.  What do you think the odds are we will actually have that discussion?

Tuesday Update:  It is not getting any better.  There has been some recognition that just maybe we encouraged Georgia to move boldly and foolishly against Russia so maybe we will have an adult discussion of this problem.  But then Nancy Pelosi said on the drilling issue that she might consider a vote on limited drilling if we put a lot of other things on the table, and CNN’s blown dry hair set’s reaction was, “Flip-flop”, and “score one for John McCain”.  With this kind of press characterizing a move to try to compromise and find middle ground as losing, why would politician dare risk ever compromising?  They are all scum and should apply to Entertainment Tonight where their limited skills might be better suited.  There was one bright spot:  David Schuster stood in for Chris, I’ll never let you finish your answer, Mathews on Hardball and knew his subject so his interviewees could not dodge their perveracations.  It was refreshing.  He is diffinitely a candidate to host Meet the Press.