John McCain's foreign 'policy' problem is that he doesn't really have a policy. What he has are several tics, or gut reactions, that keep getting played out on the world stage. When you look at the sum of what he advocates, it amounts to a vague, incoherent, contradictory, self-defeating mish mash of reactions against things McCain doesn't like. Almost entirely negative, his foreign 'policy' offers very little that is forward looking. At best, he identifies a few things he doesn't want to see happen. It's not surprising that somebody who tries to build 'policy' on a crumbly foundation of gut reactions - very much as George Bush himself - comes across frequently as rash. A McCain presidency would be dangerous not just because he shoots from the hip, but because that's a symptom of a deeper problem: He has no clear idea what he wants to achieve. He has no method, no meaningful goal, and thus no path to get there.

A coherent foreign policy doesn't necessarily require elaboration in lengthy tracts aimed toward policy wonks. It just requires coherence...that is, it needs to be backed up by thought until national interests, goals, and methods are brought into line. Typically, you can tell that thinking is clear when it can be summarized. So for example this is the core of a coherent foreign policy.

Avoid foreign entanglements.

Clearly that's not a policy McCain embraces; perhaps one he doesn't even comprehend, given his desperate desire to enroll Georgia in NATO while it's enmeshed in war.

In any case, McCain has never clearly enunciated his foreign policy either in whole or in part. For example, anybody who's paid attention over the years to his many strange and contradictory pronouncements about Iraq, going back to McCain's determination since 2001 to promote an invasion, is left with the uncomfortable feeling that he has only the vaguest idea what he stands for and why, what his goals are and how to achieve them. He wants 'victory' and he's against 'defeat' in Iraq; that's about the extent of his ruminations. His Strategy for Victory in Iraq, though no doubt burnished by his campaign staff, is reactive and negative at best:

It would be a grave mistake to leave before Al Qaeda in Iraq is defeated and before a competent, trained, and capable Iraqi security force is in place and operating effectively. We must help the Government of Iraq battle those who provoke sectarian tensions and promote a civil war that could destabilize the Middle East. Iraq must not become a failed state, a haven for terrorists, or a pawn of Iran...The best way to secure long-term peace and security is to establish a stable, prosperous, and democratic state in Iraq that poses no threat to its neighbors and contributes to the defeat of terrorists.

More than 5 years into this war and McCain is still talking on the level of magical ponies. When pressed for serious answers about the intractable problems, he camouflages his vacuity in rambling appeals to support the troops and such not. He numbs the mind in the hopes that listeners won't notice that he can't put together national interests, goals, and methods in a coherent Iraq policy.

The underlying problem with McCain's foreign 'policy' has been so glaring for so long with regard to Iraq that I'd almost stopped noticing it. However the war in Georgia has really brought it into sharp relief in a very short span of time. McCain has nothing like a coherent policy. He hasn't tried to align realistic interests, goals, and methods. Instead, his positions have been almost entirely reactive and negative. They're governed mostly by what he dislikes - in this case, Russia and Vladimir Putin. It's a classic demonstration of how McCain makes 'policy' by shooting from the hip.

And once again, McCain was wrong as events showed. He wanted the US and NATO to take the toughest (im)possible line against Russia to the point of confrontation. His gut hatred of Russia/Putin simply blinded him to Russia's frequently expressed interest (i) in keeping NATO away from its doorstep and out of the Caucasus, and (ii) in reversing a series of humiliations at the hands of Bush, particularly (iii) in making a counter-example of the US intevention in Kosovo. That's a lot to ignore. With his blinkered and reactive view of the conflict, McCain couldn't see that a likely outcome of the fighting would be that Russia would lay off Georgia once it had humiliated Saakashvili. Instead, McCain could only see Hitler on the move. It was all about 'Defense of the West' vs 'appeasement' as far as he was concerned. So he staked out an impossibly bellicose position and was left high and dry when the tawdry little war sputtered out more or less as realistic observers anticipated.

Indeed for more than a week McCain's bellicose position consistently and perversely ran afoul of absolutely basic facts. From the moment the Russians counter-attacked in South Ossetia, McCain has been acting as if he were president - calling Mikheil Saakashvili daily, announcing that Americans are all Georgians, even sending his own personal envoys to meddle in affairs he has little say in. McCain has also been pushing aggressively for a confrontational policy. He's hinted repeatedly that he might insert US and NATO troops into the conflict on behalf of Georgia. Yet neither NATO nor the US is in any position to get troops there quickly, even if we wished to. McCain blamed the fighting entirely on Russia, failing to acknowledge that the Georgians started it. McCain has lavished praise on Saakashvili for his leadership and moderation, though the Georgian President obviously began the conflict with the intention of dragging the US in as his ally. Indeed this interview with Saakashvili, conducted on the eve of the war, shows that the propaganda McCain subsequently adopted had been prepared for him in Georgia before Saakashvili sent the troops in:

In this conversation, with fullscale war just 2 hours away, the Georgian president insists that his country does not seek conflict with Russia. He appears to understand the stakes involved, acknowledging that Russia’s population is 30 times larger than Georgia’s and that any Georgian attempt to reclaim one of the separatist regions would mean opening a war against Russia itself.

But at the same time, in this interview, Saakashvili is openly contemptuous of his counterparts in Russia. “You know them and their corruption,” he says; “you can imagine what horrible consequences there would be if we followed their political and economic model.” He says he cannot imagine the West not coming to Georgia’s aid. It would be like the betrayal of Hungary in 1956 or the then Czechoslovakia in 1968, when the Soviet Union’s aggressive repression of restive satellites was met with silence from the West.

Does America's interest really involve seeking a military confrontation with Russia by aligning ourselves so closely with Georgia's as to equate our interests? Is the US able to achieve what Georgia might wish, and if so at what cost? Once involved, can the US disentangle itself if affairs in the Caucasus spiral out of control? These are questions that McCain never seems to have asked himself in his headlong embrace (as a mere candidate) of yet another potential quagmire.

This August 13 NPR interview highlights the shallowness of McCain's thinking as he blathers about what the Georgian war means for his foreign policy views. There's just nothing here but gut feelings stated and restated. Notice too that McCain even repeats as fact the assumption that the Russian attack was about controlling the oil pipeline running through Georgia. The idea had been thoroughly discredited by that time, if only because the Russians made no move to seize the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline.

RENEE MONTAGNE: Russia's president did order an end to Russian military operations there. To the degree that that is in effect, and to the degree that peace talks are in motion, how much did statements from the West make a difference here? Because there is an argument that they didn't make much difference at all, that Russia had its own agenda, and it came and went as it pleased in Georgia.

JOHN MCCAIN: Well, I think, to a large extent, unfortunately, that's the case. They want a friendly country on their border. They want to control the oil pipelines that goes through there. And this is clearly in keeping with the Russian ambitions for the old, near a broad control of or absolute takeover of surrounding countries. And this may be trying to send a message to Ukraine and other countries in the region.

MONTAGNE: Well, there would be those who would say that that message has been sent and heard even beyond the region. What, realistically, could the U.S. in particular do to prevent, as you say, other sorts of influence that the Russians would like to exert in that region?

MCCAIN: Well, I think, in the short term, there is limited options, certainly, that we have. Long term, I think we may be in a period of relations with Russia where we have to make sure that we help our friends, that we do what we can to protect democracies and freedom, and make sure that we understand that there is a new era that obviously began when President Putin took over, and so we will adjust our relations accordingly.

And I don't think that there's going to be a re-ignition of the Cold War; don't get me wrong. I don't think there's going to be nuclear-weapons buildups, et cetera, but I think that Russian behavior is not acceptable. And we will do what we can to maintain our alliances and our friends and make the Russians understand that this kind of behavior is not a part of what we view as the 21st century.

So his European foreign 'policy' amounts to helping friends and protecting democracies and freedom while making sure Russians know we don't like their behavior. I think it's fair to say that's about as deep as McCain ever gets. He offers nothing about broad goals or methods or outcomes. McCain doesn't even have an ideology to fall back upon, to create a framework in which he might conjure a foreign policy.

I suspect that's why McCain fell so easily captive to the neocons during the late 1990s. They at least have (bad) ideas and a coherent set of goals and methods - though thoroughly unworkable ones.

All McCain has going for him, however, is his gut. By 2008 we've all had quite enough of that kind of foreign 'policy'.

Around the time of the first Gulf War in 1991 I attended an unintentionally hilarious meeting of Iraqi exile groups in DC. There was talk in Washington of overthrowing Saddam Hussein via Iraqi exiles, and this meeting had been called to put their differences aside and forge a united strategy toward that goal. A Middle East historian friend and I decided to drive into DC that evening to have a look for ourselves. We wanted to see whether these exiles were still living up to their long established reputation for being bitterly divided and dysfunctional. Overthrowing a government is a pretty big step. Though in no way connected to the policy-making crowd, we figured as citizens we ought to inform ourselves before the US started making definitive moves to bring chaos to Iraq, of all places.

Dozens of exiles showed up from across the spectrum of political groups; my friend remarked that all the usual suspects were in attendance. "This is going to get ugly," he predicted. The agenda lasted for all of a minute or two. Almost as soon as the meeting got under way, it was interrupted by a long and impassioned rant (by a Kurdish exile, if I recall rightly). Another Iraqi jumped up and began slanging off the first guy. The floodgates opened. From every corner of the room came accusations and counter-accusations. The occasional call for unity was shouted down. An Iraqi sitting nearby looked at us nervously, trying to assess how we were taking this in. A moment later he inserted himself into one of the shouting matches. After about 90 minutes of this mayhem we had to flee; it was all we could do to stifle our laughter amidst these zealots.

I was reminded of this episode yesterday by the reaction here to a post about Francis Fukuyama's latest attempt to obscure his history of backing the neocon project to overthrow Hussein. In an op-ed Fukuyama twitted George Bush for legitimizing "regime change" by invading Iraq, without however acknowledging that for years he'd advocated exactly that as a member of PNAC. A suprising number of commenters sprang to his defense. Didn't I know that Fukuyama had broken with the neocons some time ago? Some here are even credulous about his unsupported claim that he came out in opposition to the invasion way back in 2002 - although he's on record as supporting the decision to invade fully two months after the invasion.

It seems that for some on the left, merely expressing regret after the fact for having been proved disastrously wrong (with a healthy dash of historical revisionism) makes up for the years Fukuyama spent advocating for an illegal invasion of a sovereign country. You see it shows that in contrast to the other neocons he's got some sense, don't you know.

Except it doesn't and nothing can. Setting aside Fukuyama's embrace of international lawlessness, what about those Iraqi exiles he backed as the means to replace Hussein? On Sept. 20, 2001 he signed the PNAC Letter to George Bush, which called for Hussein's overthrow "even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the [9/11] attack".

Failure to undertake such an effort will constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender in the war on international terrorism. The United States must therefore provide full military and financial support to the Iraqi opposition. American military force should be used to provide a "safe zone" in Iraq from which the opposition can operate. And American forces must be prepared to back up our commitment to the Iraqi opposition by all necessary means.

By "opposition" PNAC meant the Iraqi exile groups. The letter was issued immediately after 19 hours of talks organized by Paul Wolfowitz to advance the neocon agenda. The meetings were conducted by circumventing the State Department, though Ahmed Chalabi was on hand to advocate for a US invasion to back a takeover by Iraqi exile groups.

There is no excuse for any who signed the 2001 PNAC letter. For more than a decade, any moderately well informed observer in Washington knew that the Iraqi exiles were a bunch of clowns. If the PNAC gang were unaware of their reputation, then the first step should have been to learn more about the exile groups before trying to tie US foreign policy to these jokers. Therefore every single one of these PNAC signatories is on record as a fool or a knave. Nothing any  of them says about foreign policy should ever be taken seriously. And notice that one of these is John McCain's chief adviser on foreign policy. Nobody on the left should be giving any of this gang the benefit of the doubt.

William Kristol, Gary Bauer, Jeffrey Bell, William J. Bennett, Jeffrey Bergner, Eliot Cohen, Seth Cropsey, Midge Decter, Thomas Donnelly, Aaron Friedberg, Hillel Fradkin, Francis Fukuyama, Frank Gaffney, Jeffrey Gedmin, Reuel Marc Gerecht, Charles Hill, Bruce P. Jackson, Eli S. Jacobs, Michael Joyce, Donald Kagan, Robert Kagan, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Charles Krauthammer, John Lehman, Clifford May, Richard Perle, Martin Peretz, Norman Podhoretz, Randy Scheunemann, Gary Schmitt, William Schneider, Jr., Richard H. Shultz, Henry Sokolski, Stephen J. Solarz, Vin Weber, Leon Wieseltier, Marshall Wittmann

Francis Fukuyama in the WSJ is trying once again to elide his history as a neocon and retrospectively align himself instead with the critics of everything he once stood for. Turns out he warned a friend, in private, that invading Iraq might not work out so well - he says. This bit is particularly hilarious:

The Bush administration this week rebuked Russia for its disproportionate military intervention in Georgia; many rightly suspect Moscow's real goal is regime change of the pro-Western, democratic government in Tbilisi. But who set the most recent precedent for a big power intervening to change a regime it didn't like, without the sanction of the U.N. Security Council or any other legitimating international body?

Here is Fukuyama 10 years ago in the PNAC Letter to President Bill Clinton on Iraq (PDF).

We urge you to seize that opportunity, and to enunciate a new strategy that would secure the interests of the U.S. and our friends and allies around the world. That strategy should aim, above all, at the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime from power...

As you have rightly declared, Mr. President, the security of the world in the first part of the 21st century will be determined largely by how we handle this threat...

In the near term, this means a willingness to undertake military action as diplomacy is clearly failing. In the long term, it means removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power. That now needs to become the aim of American foreign policy...

We believe the U.S. has the authority under existing UN resolutions to take the necessary steps, including military steps, to protect our vital interests in the Gulf. In any case, American policy cannot continue to be crippled by a misguided insistence on unanimity in the UN Security Council.

I wonder how that campaign to ingratiate himself with an Obama administration is going for him?

To his increasing embarrassment, John McCain's aggressive demands for immediate confrontation with Russia in the Caucasus have been left high and dry by Russia's willingness to call a truce once it had humiliated the belligerent Georgian President. Today as he tried to justify his foreign 'policy' adventurism to reporters, John McCain made a rather startling pronouncement. As so often, McCain was taking his cue from his other inept ally, George Bush. Said McCain:

"In the 21st century, nations don’t invade other nations."

So does that pronouncement disqualify McCain for the presidency? Or just disqualify him to speak about his own 'policy' toward Iraq?

Carl Hulse in the NYT highlights the most glaring weakness of just about the weakest conceivable Vice Presidential contender, Evan Bayh: Bayh worked with John McCain to push hard for an invasion of Iraq and even served as co-chair on the neocon "Committee for the Liberation of Iraq" (joining McCain and Lieberman, the only other sitting Senators in the group).

However the Times also quotes Al From talking up his DLC pal's VP chances. It's a classic example of the thinking of the 'serious' types in DC who fetishize hawkishness.

"The antiwar people cannot define the Democratic Party," said Al From, a founder of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, of which Mr. Bayh was chairman for four years. "I think Evan’s real strength is you get someone on the ticket who has a record of being strong on national security, and that is a very important quality to have."

Because you don't want to reward people who were right. There has to be room at the top for people who were dead wrong about the most important national security debate of our time. Hell, anybody can see that 'wrong' and 'strong' rhyme.

How would the trad media have portrayed Barack Obama if he had behaved as John McCain has done since Georgian President Saakashvili sent troops into South Ossetia? Would it have been 'presumptuous' to issue proposals to intervene in the fighting even before the President had spoken? To stake out an aggressive position far in front of anything the US wished to adopt? To attack a rival candidate for refusing to do the same?

How about if he'd compared the original, impetuous aggressors in this ugly conflict to the victims of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001? What if he claimed to be able to speak for the nation?

"I told [Saakashvili] that I know I speak for every American when I said to him, today, we are all Georgians."

No. Instead it looks like the term being used in the trad media to describe McCain's every action in regard to Georgia - no matter how ill-advised - is 'prescient'. Here is an example of that famous 'prescience': McCain nominated Saakashvili for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005. Presumably McCain was able to foresee that in 2008 repeated efforts to convince Saakashvili to keep the peace with Russia would work out so well for everybody.

A veritable Themistocles in his 'prescience', John McCain is. But 'presumptuous'? Not so far, it would seem.

John McCain has myriad conflicts of interest via the many lobbyists who serve as his top campaign staffers and advisers. Leave it to the Wall Street Journal to find a silver lining in what lesser mortals would view simply as corruption as usual.

John McCain's top foreign-policy adviser, Randy Scheunemann, is a leading expert on U.S.-allied Georgia -- and was a paid lobbyist for the former Soviet republic until March, in the run-up to what has become a major battle between Georgia and Russia.

Democratic rival Barack Obama's presidential campaign was quick to try to paint Mr. Scheunemann's dual roles as a conflict of interest after Sen. McCain swiftly took Georgia's side in the dispute, and cited it as evidence that Sen. McCain is "ensconced in a lobbyist culture," as Obama spokesman Hari Sevugan told reporters over the weekend.

But given the rapid escalation of the fighting, and the fact that Georgia is being viewed as a victim of its neighbor's aggression, Mr. Scheunemann's ties to the small nation and its pro-Western Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili may look less like a weakness and more like a strength in the first foreign-policy crisis of the general election campaign.

Nothing evokes strength like depending upon a registered agent of a foreign government.

Nobody outside Georgia tried harder to get the US to rush precipitously into the conflict with Russia than John McCain - even though by Monday he'd retreated to the point of merely urging more diplomatic pressure. His first reactions tell you what kind of president he'd be, however. And clearly he's bellicose in a way that makes even Dick Cheney look like a wuss.

On Friday as soon as fighting broke out McCain put all the blame on Russia and called for the involvement of NATO. His campaign, via Georgian-lobbyist turned foreign policy adviser Randy Scheunemann, also immediately set about politicizing the crisis by trying to use it to score points against Barack Obama.

[Scheunemann] also criticized Obama for calling on both sides to show "restraint," and suggested the Democrat was putting too much blame on the conflict’s clear victim.

Of course Georgia was not merely a "victim" in provoking this crisis, and the only country Obama actually singled out for blame was Russia for invading Georgia's sovereign territory.

"I strongly condemn the outbreak of violence in Georgia, and urge an immediate end to armed conflict. Now is the time for Georgia and Russia to show restraint, and to avoid an escalation to full scale war. Georgia’s territorial integrity must be respected. All sides should enter into direct talks on behalf of stability in Georgia, and the United States, the United Nations Security Council, and the international community should fully support a peaceful resolution to this crisis."

But Obama did call for restraint and that was so inexcusable that the McCain campaign has inflated its attack further.

In fact, the initial response from the Obama campaign was characterized by precisely the kind of rhetoric that the leaders of these nations warn against--a meaningless statement that equates the victim with the victimizer by calling on both sides to show restraint. Asking the Georgians to show restraint is like asking the Hungarians to show restraint as Russian tanks rolled into the country in 1956, or for restraint from the students in Prague in 1968.

The reaction of the Obama campaign to this crisis, so at odds with our democratic allies and yet so bizarrely in sync with Moscow, doesn't merely raise questions about Senator Obama's judgment--it answers them.

Except that Obama's statements, unlike McCain's, were in fact in sync with the statements of America's allies and of McCain's personal ally, George Bush:

"We urge restraint on all sides — that violence would be curtailed and that direct dialogue could ensue in order to help resolve their differences," White House spokeswoman Dana Perino told reporters.

What's more on Sunday, two days after McCain began denouncing Obama's call for "restraint", Dick Cheney praised Georgia for its "restraint".

"The vice president praised President Saakashvili for his government's restraint, offers of cease-fire, and disengagement of Georgian forces from the zone of conflict in the South Ossetian region of the country," the statement said.

With even the blustering Cheney on board, it looks like just about everybody thought the Georgians needed to show some restraint - except John McCain. That shows the kind of president he'd make.

At every turn, John McCain is entangled by the ties of the lobbyists who serve as his campaign staffers and advisers. The sudden outbreak of war in the Caucasus brings to light an especially dangerous example of this, and suggests he'll never be free of his lobbyist problem.

McCain's top foreign policy adviser, Randy Scheunemann, was until March a registered lobbyist for the Republic of Georgia. His firm continues to work on behalf of Georgia and other countries in the region. In 2006, lobbyist Scheunemann accompanied McCain on a trip to Georgia. And since Friday, McCain and Scheunemann have been issuing bellicose pronouncements on behalf of Georgia in its conflict with Russia over the breakaway enclave of South Ossetia. However neither of them mentioned that Scheunemann was a Georgian lobbyist.

The conflict in Georgia also brought attention to another complicating feature of McCain’s campaign: His ties to Republican operatives with extensive lobbying practices. Scheunemann was, until earlier this year, registered to lobby for the government of Georgia.

A public relations firm working for the Russian Federation pointed out Scheunemann’s lobbying past to reporters — a sign that McCain’s stance is not, for better or worse, being welcomed in Moscow — as did Obama’s campaign.

“John McCain’s top foreign policy adviser lobbied for, and has a vested interest in, the Republic of Georgia and McCain has mirrored the position advocated by the government,” said Obama spokesman Hari Sevugan, noting that the “appearance of a conflict of interest” was a consequence of McCain’s too-close ties to lobbyists.

The conflict in South Ossetia is complex and nearly every observer of the situation blames both Georgia and Russia for escalating the long-simmering tensions there. As Ben Smith notes, Barack Obama issued a statement condeming the violence and urging both Georgia and Russia to end the conflict and avoid further escalation. It was similar to the line taken by the Bush administration and virtually all other western nations, all of whom recognize that there's plenty of blame to spread around and little advantage to wade in immediately scoring points against one of the parties to the war.

Not John McCain, however. His statement was frankly confrontational toward Russia, which he blames exclusively for the fighting. McCain also calls for NATO to be inserted into the conflict, though Georgia is not a NATO member.  McCain also dusted off his bizarre call for Russia to be kicked out of The G-8. And Randy Scheunemann immediately tried to politicize the conflict - without however mentioning that he was a lobbyist for Georgia.

"Sen. McCain is clearly willing to note who he thinks is the aggressor here,” he said, dismissing the notion that Georgia’s move into its renegade province had precipitated the crisis. "I don't think you can excuse, defend, explain or make allowance for Russian behavior because of what is going on in Georgia.”

He also criticized Obama for calling on both sides to show “restraint,” and suggested the Democrat was putting too much blame on the conflict’s clear victim.

“That's kind of like saying after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, that Kuwait and Iraq need to show restraint, or like saying in 1968 [when the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia] ... that the Czechoslovaks should show restraint,” he said.

As shown by the contrast between the reactions to the fighting in Georgia from Obama and McCain, the US cannot afford a president who is instinctively and immediately belligerent in every international crisis. Further, McCain is ensnared irretrievably by the lobbyists he's surrounded himself with. Americans can't be sure of knowing what kinds of conflicts of interest lie behind John McCain's pronouncements on both foreign and domestic issues.

The parallel to McCain's problems this week with voters in Wilmington, OH is striking. In his latest visit there, McCain tried to downplay the role that his campaign manager, Rick Davis, had in lobbying for the DHL deal that now threatens to leave tens of thousands unemployed in southern Ohio. Indeed, McCain personally had intervened in the Senate to push the DHL deal through. Yet as Obama manager David Plouffe pointed out, until the Cleveland Plain Dealer this week uncovered Davis' role as a lobbyist for DHL, McCain had tried to keep concerned Ohio voters in the dark about that most basic of facts:

"[John McCain] was there a month ago in this community and was asked a question about this DHL issue and did not say one word about his role in this or the role of his campaign manager. That is the furthest thing from straight talk that we can imagine."

McCain's lobbyist entanglements will keep getting worse as this campaign progresses. They should help to keep him out of the White House, where his lobbyist buddies don't belong.

On Thursday the jurors in Salim Hamdan's military tribunal at Guantanamo deliberated for only one hour before agreeing on a sentence of just 66 months. They'd already determined that the judge, Capt. Keith Allred, planned to count Hamdan's incarceration as time served. So the "stunningly light sentence" was a rebuke of the Bush administration on several levels simultaneously. The jury in effect sentenced Hamdan to a prison term for the duration of the Bush administration.

It's hard to believe that was accidental. The military prosecutors had asked for a sentence of 30 years to life - even after failing to get a conviction for the most serious charges leveled against Hamdan. It looks like the 6 senior officers of the jury decided to send a carefully calculated message: By making Hamdan's punishment co-terminous with Bush's presidency, the jurors implied that the brutal and lawless system at Guantanamo is an artifact of this administration and should not outlive it.

There's an obvious parallel from another nightmarish era of civil liberties abuses: the delay in releasing Eugene Debs and other war protestors until after the expiry of the Wilson administration, which had wrongly imprisoned the men during WWI and held them until the bitter end. A vindictive Woodrow Wilson was never going to free Debs and the rest, and it required a new administration to do the decent thing. The Debs case is a landmark of presidential abuse of power during time of war.

The war crimes charges against Hamdan looked almost as overblown, given that the jury found he took no part in Bin Laden's terrorist conspiracies. In fact, the jurors had secret testimony indicating that Hamdan had tried to help his captors to catch Bin Laden.

Why the jury decided on the short sentence wasn't clear. But sources familiar with secret testimony for the defense given July 31 said the information revealed in that testimony likely angered the jurors.

Two senior Army Special Forces officers told a closed session of the trial of an "opportunity" that Hamdan had offered them in Afghanistan in the first weeks after his Nov. 24, 2001, capture. That chance was "squandered" by the government, Navy Lt. Cmdr. Brian Mizer, a defense lawyer, said in his closing argument before Wednesday's verdict.

Speculation has focused on a blown opportunity to capture bin Laden, as Hamdan might have known his whereabouts.

What's clear in any case is that the military jury decided to deliver a 'slap in the face' to the Bush administration and its detention policies.

One final point: The Bush administration via the Pentagon has implied that it will continue to hold Gitmo prisoners no matter what the verdicts of the tribunals. Even Judge Allred didn't know whether Hamdan would be released after he serves out his term. So the sentence, which runs through late December, also puts Bush on the spot during the last few weeks of his rule. He has the chance, if he chooses to take it, to demonstrate once again for posterity that he fits the Wilsonian mold of the vindictive, embittered president. After that, though, his wishes will suddenly stop mattering any longer.

Who knew, Democratic voters don't want to send a bigoted, union-busting lawyer to Congress. Nikki Tinker was trounced today in the Democratic primary in TN-09. With 89% of precincts reporting, incumbent Steve Cohen leads Tinker 79% to 19%.

It's a humiliation not just for the vile Tinker but also for those who endorsed her, especially EMILY's List and the DLC's Harold Ford, Jr. Her scurrilous, racist, anti-semitic attacks on the widely admired Cohen were so repulsive that in the last days before the primary EMILY's List felt obliged to renounce them. And so did her former employer, Harold Ford, though only a few hours before the polls closed. The humiliation for Tinker and her backers was not just the repudiation of her and her tactics that Tennessee voters delivered today. The deeper humiliation was the kind of campaign she ran, and the willingness of her backers to look the other way for so long. They've all lost face from this campaign.

Steve Cohen, on the other hand, deserves plaudits for rising above the muck and triumphing.

In case you'd forgotten, presidential elections are also terror alert season. There's still time for the 'smart' voter to accessorize.

During the summer and fall of 2004, right up to Election Day, DHS favored us with a long string of dubious terror alerts. The effect was to give Bush's sagging approval ratings a boost.

Already DHS is preparing the ground for what could be another lively game of scare the bejeezus out of voters (h/t BJ).

Anti-terror officials in the U.S. cite this summer and fall's lineup of two major political parties' conventions, November's general election and months of transition into a new presidential administration as cause for heightened awareness and action.

This is what the Department of Homeland Security is quietly declaring a Period of Heightened Alert, or POHA, a time frame when terrorists may have more incentive to attack...

At the moment, the nation's public threat level will remain at yellow, or "elevated," but not orange, or "high."

The reasons: There are no specifics indicating an attack on the U.S. is imminent, and U.S. officials do not want to be accused of trying to inject themselves into the presidential campaign.

Accused 'again', one might almost have said. This game is right on schedule compared to four years ago. Notoriously, on July 8, 2004 DHS head Tom Ridge held a press conference announcing that people should expect more terror alerts before the election. He made himself such a laughing stock that the next year Ridge tried to shift the blame for his own alerts to officials at other agencies. This time, though, DHS is trying play it cooler. Their window for alerts extends potentially through July 2009. You see, it's not just an election year gimmmick.

Government officials point to the Sept. 11 attacks, which happened just nine months into a new administration...They say history suggests a need to take potential threats seriously -- especially in the very near future.

It's a two-fer: Excuse the politicization of terror alerts in advance, and make excuses retrospectively for Bush's utter failure to act on this Presidential Daily Briefing 7 years ago today.

George Bush and George Tenet both deny the allegation leveled by Ron Suskind's new book, The Way of the World, that in late 2003 the White House ordered the CIA to forge and circulate a letter that would seem to justify the invasion of Iraq after the fact. Here is WH deputy press secretary Tony Fratto:

"Ron Suskind makes a living from gutter journalism. He is about selling books and making wild allegations that no one can verify..."

Bush has a long record of dishonesty, and Tenet's memoirs were not exactly a model of candor. There's no reason to give weight to either man's denials. Suskind has a record of credibility, and his account is partly backed up by Sir Richard Dearlove. But that doesn't mean Suskind's allegation about a forged letter, which depends on the word of two former CIA agents (Rob Richer and John Maguire), is necessarily credible. Do we have any independent means to assess its likelihood?

The best we can do is to examine known patterns to see if they tend to fit with the forgery allegation. Here are several.

Is there other evidence of the WH endorsing public deception to make a case for war? Check. In a Jan. 31, 2003 WH meeting Bush proposed to Tony Blair that, absent any actual justification for war, the US should paint one of our spy planes in UN colors and provoke Iraq to shoot it down. Enough said.

Suskind's sources allege that the author of the forged letter, the director of Iraqi intelligence,  Tahir Jalil Habbush al-Tikriti, had earlier entered into secret talks with the British before the invasion. He sent word to Bush that Hussein had no active chemical, biological, or nuclear programs – but Bush rejected the information and said he didn't wish to learn any more of what Habbush had to reveal. Is there other evidence of Bush shutting down lines of communication with Iraqi officials who were conveying unwelcome information? Check. In Sept. 2002 the CIA convinced Iraq's foreign minister, Naji Sabri, to feed information secretly to the US about Iraq's WMD capabilities. The WH was ecstatic at first. But Sabri said Hussein had none. The WH stopped listening.

Does the CIA have a history of forging documents? Check.

Were there any grounds to think the letter, published in Dec. 2003 by Con Coughlin, is a forgery? Obviously, the letter had classic hallmarks of a forgery. Forged documents typically relate to important people or events, and generally tell us something highly remarkable that goes well beyond what we already knew. Often it intersects with controversies, typically purporting to settle them. Often it appears precisely when controversies are intense. It's provenance often is mysterious, though a figure with authority may vouch for it. It spells things out more than authentic documents tend to do. With forged documents, the identity, interests, or attitudes of their creators often can be perceived from the contents with striking clarity because the forgery rarely leaves room for (authentic) ambiguity. When a document pops up that meets any of those criteria, there's a good probability that it's a forgery.

In this case, the letter meets all the criteria. It posits incredibly enough that Hussein oversaw a visit to Iraq by Mohammed Atta just two months before Sept. 11, 2001.  In fact, the letter outdoes itself. It presents not just one dramatic revelation, but two (the second describes the import to Iraq of uranium yellow-cake from Niger). It's provenance was shrouded in mystery.

Although Iraqi officials refused to disclose how and where they had obtained the document, Dr Ayad Allawi, a member of Iraq's ruling seven-man Presidential Committee, said the document was genuine.

Everything about the letter tends in the direction of exculpating the Bush administration over its baseless (and by the summer of 2003, badly discredited) allegations against Saddam Hussein. In other words, there's virtually no chance that the letter is not a forgery.

One further pattern: the conduit for publication. How could any reporter with a shred of sense, when leaked this obviously forged document, treat it as genuine?

The arch-conservative Telegraph's Con Coughlin has frequently and accurately been described by blogger and British ex-pat Cernig as a reliable neocon shill. Over the years Coughlin has dutifully passed on so much official and semi-official disinformation about the Middle East on behalf of the Bush and Blair governments, that he's become a parody of a journalist. Without any doubt, he is the first reporter I would have leaked this forgery to if I were doing this job for the CIA. The fact that Coughlin is involved strengthens the case that the letter was forged by somebody connected to the neocon war faction in either the US or UK governments.

So, there are plenty of patterns that support Suskind's allegation. I'd like to know what the evidence is against it – if any. Because the forging of a document by the CIA to influence public perception in the US of the decision to invade Iraq would constitute an act of domestic propaganda.

Ronald Reagan managed to convince a surprising number of people who should have known better that the federal government is the enemy and government regulation is the problem rather than a solution. The Savings & Loan crisis (with the Keating Five scandal) should have put an end to that nonsense, but some were slow to figure out that regulations typically exist for a reason. The corporate looting of America under George Bush finally is putting an end to that canard, however. Americans get it. Regulations are there to protect them. And even before the corporate scandals of the last few years, one trend was clear: The more an industry earns a reputation for being untrustworthy, the more Democrats, Republicans, and Independents favor increased regulation of it.

Three stories today on the front pages of three national newspapers tell the tale. These are the kinds of practices that should not be occuring under a government that takes regulation seriously. You know, under a Democratic administration. From Ellen Nakashima at WaPo we learn that insurers are snooping around in people's medicine cabinets:

Health and life insurance companies have access to a powerful new tool for evaluating whether to cover individual consumers: a health "credit report" drawn from databases containing prescription drug records on more than 200 million Americans.

Collecting and analyzing personal health information in commercial databases is a fledgling industry, but one poised to take off as the nation enters the age of electronic medical records. While lawmakers debate how best to oversee the shift to computerized records, some insurers have already begun testing systems that tap into not only prescription drug information, but also data about patients held by clinical and pathological laboratories...

The trend holds promise for improved health care and cost savings, but privacy and consumer advocates fear it is taking place largely outside the scrutiny of federal health regulators and lawmakers.

Meanwhile Vikas Bajaj of the NYT explains that the mortgage crisis is about to get much worse as gimmicky loan terms at prime rates begin to bite:

The first wave of Americans to default on their home mortgages appears to be cresting, but a second, far larger one is quickly building.

Homeowners with good credit are falling behind on their payments in growing numbers, even as the problems with mortgages made to people with weak, or subprime, credit are showing their first, tentative signs of leveling off after two years of spiraling defaults.

Predatory lending of all sorts has been allowed to go unchecked for years under Republicans. By contrast, Barack Obama has made abusive lending practices a signature issue, including the re-regulation of credit cards and payday lenders (PDF).

And from the front page of that leftist rag the WSJ, we learn that increasingly pension plans are being siphoned for executive perks. It's all done in secrecy and by sleight of hand:

At a time when scores of companies are freezing pensions for their workers, some are quietly converting their pension plans into resources to finance their executives' retirement benefits and pay.

In recent years, companies from Intel Corp. to CenturyTel Inc. collectively have moved hundreds of millions of dollars of obligations for executive benefits into rank-and-file pension plans. This lets companies capture tax breaks intended for pensions of regular workers and use them to pay for executives' supplemental benefits and compensation.

The practice has drawn scant notice. A close examination by The Wall Street Journal shows how it works and reveals that the maneuver, besides being a dubious use of tax law, risks harming regular workers. It can drain assets from pension plans and make them more likely to fail. Now, with the current bear market in stocks weakening many pension plans, this practice could put more in jeopardy...

Generally, only the executives are aware this is being done. Benefits consultants have advised companies to keep quiet to avoid an employee backlash.

Ripping off pension plans to the point of crisis is one of the most vile legacies of Republican governance. Americans will be looking to Democrats to rein in corporate excesses.

John McCain's attack ads were a topic of the Sunday blab fests. They were a study in contrasts between McCain's surrogates and honest folk. Here are two such, first from Meet The Press:

MR. BROKAW: Senator Lieberman, let me just share with you and with our audience as well what Senator McCain had to say earlier about the tone of the campaign.

(Videotape, April 14, 2008):

SEN. JOHN McCAIN (R-AZ): This will be a respectful campaign. Americans want a respectful campaign.

They're tired of the attacks. They're tired of the impugning people's character and integrity. They want a respectful campaign, and, and I, and I am of the firm belief that they'll get it and that they can get it if the American people demand it and reject a lot of this negative stuff that goes on.

(End videotape)

MR. BROKAW: And just this past week you said to the Palm Beach Post, "There's a problem in Washington. That problem is partisanship, grown people going to Washington acting like children having a mud fight." Do you think running a campaign ad in which you feature Britney Spears and Paris Hilton with Barack Obama is respectful?

SEN. LIEBERMAN: I do.

Lieberman also conceded that of course McCain's strategy is to make Obama seem scary:

I want to say just a word about the, the racial question here. And I, I speak personally. In the first place, the McCain campaign is, to use Barack Obama's words, raising the question 'Is he a risky guy?'.

Lieberman then went on to explain that in this instance it's a good kind of scare-mongering. By contrast, here is David Gergen on This Week rebutting Jake Tapper, who had asserted that "McCain hasn't done" any racial attacks. Emphasis is by Gergen:

Gergen: I think that Donna's got a point here. Everybody knows he's black, but there has been a very intentional effort to paint him as somebody outside the mainstream - other. He's not one of us.

Stephanopoulos: Mostly below the radar screen.

Gergen: It's below the radar screen. I think the McCain campaign has been scrupulous about not directly saying it. But it's the subtext of this campaign. Everybody knows it. And when they send...there are certain kinds of signals. As a native of the south, I can tell you when you see the Charlton Heston ad, the "One", that's code for "He's uppity. He oughta stay in his place." You know, we...everybody gets that who's from, you know, a southern background, we all understand that. When McCain comes out and starts talking about affirmative action, "I'm against quotas," we get what that's about. We understand where that's coming from.

George Will: He was asked!

Gergen: I understand that, but I'm just telling you that gets across. And so it's not unfair for him to sort of bring up the fact, "Hey everybody knows I'm black. Let me talk about it."

Since everybody's still talking about McCain's attack ads, one more time just for the sake of emphasis: It was John McCain's own attack ad from June that put Obama's face on the 100 dollar bill. And yet, somehow, while refusing to mention this basic fact the traditional media has helped to convince half of the country that Obama was being racist simply by referring in passing to McCain's obnoxious ad.

There's widespread agreement that the landscape of the 2008 election could lead to a political realignment of historic proportions. But how and why would that occur? How do historical parallels from earlier landmark elections help us to understand what is happening this year? Those are questions we're addressing in this Daily Kos Sunday symposium.

DHinMI has explained why the political, social, and economic background to the 1932 election provides an extremely useful model for interpreting how 2008 could play out. In 1932 Democrats built upon public disgust with failed Republican governance to send the GOP into exile for 20 years. Devilstower has discussed the 1976 election in which another Democrat running as an outsider swept aside a discredited and incompetent Republican Party to try to institute a much needed agenda of reform. And DemFromCT has examined Carter's strategy in 1980 by which he tried and failed to paint the Republican outsider as incompetent and scary.

Historical models assist us in seeing trends, in highlighting how various factors can influence elections. Historical models are a means to think in a more focused way about the historical forces at work. They're not predictive. The circumstances of each era are particular to itself. With that in mind, I'll explore one further model that bears striking parallels to the current election - the 1968 battle that helped to restore Republican dominance of the presidency for a generation.

Unlike most presidential elections, in 1968 victory hinged on foreign policy perhaps more than on the pressing domestic issues.

That's not to minimize the significance of the appeal to racial bigotry by Nixon and Wallace in the wake of the Civil Rights Act, nor the mileage Nixon got out of his promise to restore law and order. Much of the country was fearful after a year of assassinations and riots and protests; Nixon hoped to win by stoking that fear. His personality and record were rather distasteful, so his best chance of winning was to redirect attention away from himself.

Humphrey, for all the anger he engendered in capturing the Democratic nomination, could at least draw upon a reservoir of public good will toward him personally. Nixon's most tantalizing opening was to run against the Democratic policies on Vietnam. His problem, initially, was that Nixon's hawkishness was barely distinguishable from LBJ's or Humphrey's. So for most of 1968 Nixon tamely declared that he had plan, always secret, to win in Vietnam. He wanted a race on domestic issues more than Vietnam. Never the less the centrality of the war debate eventually imposed itself on the election.

The Democratic administration helped to bring the war to the forefront. Not surprisingly in the end it worked against HHH. The Vietnam war was deeply unpopular; people had stopped believing the adminstration's reassurances that victory was near. Even a momentous turn of events might not have won back popular support for an administration and a party that had waded into the quagmire. Yet HHH tied himself for most of 1968 to LBJ's war because he saw no practical way to distance himself from policies he'd always publicly embraced. Vietnam was Humphrey's greatest weakness, waiting to be exploited.

The second largest factor in the 1968 election was the hugely unpopular lame-duck president. Whoever his party had nominated was going to bear the brunt of public anger. But by accepting HHH, the Democrats elevated a candidate who had virtually no room to maneuver within a badly fractured Democratic base. HHH was not just the steady hand at the tiller. He was bound to be seen as more of the same. That made it easier for Nixon to look a little like an outsider, to run as a champion of people ignored by DC.

In any case, this is critical: LBJ was determined to salvage his historical legacy by resolving the Vietnam War before he left office. The issues in Vietnam were intractable...in the manner of most quagmires. Thus LBJ was hell bent on achieving what was nearly impossible. He conceived the notion that if he could bring peace before November, then he could hand an electoral victory to his political heir.

Hence the party's candidate, HHH, had tied his wagon to an evolving and very tenuous foreign policy agenda over which he had virtually no control. LBJ had the reins and he was taking his own path. HHH had 'me too'.

Worse still, LBJ had grown used to treating the Saigon government pretty much as a puppet, however much both sides denied the charge. It was imperious condescension. As 1968 dragged on he was never able to find a solution to the simple fact that the Vietnamese realized his weakness as a lame duck and were happy to take the opportunity to manipulate the US government in return.

Thus the title of this post. The Paris peace talks of the summer of 1968, pushed through by Johnson, quickly devolved into a joke. All parties in Vietnam dug in their heels knowing well how eager LBJ was for a deal. The prolonged dispute about the shape of the negotiating table(s) in Paris became an object of ridicule in the US. The talks bogged down for good reasons. Nearly all parties saw plenty of grounds to string Johnson along, and few reasons to bargain seriously with a lame duck.

True, LBJ was able to inject renewed life into the peace talks just before the election by promising a cessation of bombing. However through secret negotiations with Richard Nixon (which were frankly treasonous - LBJ knew about them but decided against making them public, as Clark Clifford later revealed), South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu decided to scuttle the Paris peace talks. Thieu was convinced that he could get a better deal if Nixon were elected. Johnson was stunned when Thieu refused to attend the renewed peace talks in Paris. He shouldn't have been, it was in the cards all along. Thieu knew that an election year with a lame-duck president was the best possible time to make his play. The collapse of the Paris peace talks at the last moment undermined Humphrey just as he seemed on the point of overtaking Nixon in November 1968.

It happens that what the South Vietnamese leadership was hoping to get from Nixon that they couldn't get from LBJ was a long term commitment for US military backing for Thieu's fragile regime. That is the very opposite of what is at stake for the Iraqi leadership today, which wants to use this election to leverage the removal of US forces. An important distinction, sure, but the fact remains that negotiations over the future of US-Iraqi relations, so central to McCain's campaign, will be driven as much by a newly empowered Iraqi leadership as by Bush's eagerness to cut a deal to save face over the Iraq War. Bush is hell-bent on pushing through sweeping agreements with Iraq this year, including a Status of Forces Agreement. McCain's wishes probably will play little part in how things turn out.

Since May of this year at the latest it became clear, as the Bush administration tried to twist arms, that Prime Minister Maliki had put his finger to the wind. The political winds were not blowing in Bush's direction any longer. In public Maliki began siding more and more openly with the majority of Iraqis who are critical of SOFA and what it represents, the long-term occupation of their country.

Maliki hasn't hung Bush out to dry completely. That would be counterproductive undiplomatic. Negotiations continue; the Bush administration makes more and more concessions trying to keep Maliki satisfied. Bush is left in the position of having to put on a brave face as he's left guessing.

"If I were a betting man, we'll reach an agreement with the Iraqis," Bush told a news conference in Paris.

And so it will go, a slow walk until the election veering into who knows what territory. McCain certainly doesn't know where it's headed. The roadmap that Bush and McCain were counting on this past winter is becoming increasingly irrelevant. What matters now is Bush's desperation to create a legacy, and Maliki's determination to take advantage of that desperation. If that were not clear from the collapse of the administration's entrenched positions during May and June, then it ought to be from Maliki's remarkably casual endorsement of Barack Obama's plan for troop withdrawals from Iraq in mid July.

Maliki is gradually humiliating the lame-duck George Bush. The more Bush concedes this year in his desperation to cut a deal, the weaker his position will become. The puppet has nearly become the puppetmaster.

The humiliation of John McCain goes forward at least as quickly because his Iraq policy - the centerpiece of his presidential campaign - is identical to Bush's former positions and yet he has no control over these negotiations in Iraq. It has been entirely predictable that McCain would prove to be as much as hostage to Bush's war policy as Hubert Humphrey was to Lyndon Johnson's. Bush, like Johnson, is more interested in securing his place in history than in helping his heir apparent win the election. McCain has locked himself into a war policy that's quickly becoming untenable as Bush himself abandons it. Similar patterns are emerging with regard to other foreign flash-points, Iran and North Korea, as Bush is drawn toward Barack Obama's positions.

It's finally dawning on some of McCain's advisers that they are in deep trouble on Iraq.

Update [2008-8-4 1:40:11 by smintheus]: For a similar interpretation of events in Iraq, see also this column by Peter Keating.

Back in steerage the – so called – News Boys are whooping it up so's I can't nap. Hyenas. Could use a highball myself but Rug Rat says nix. Jerks will talk about me. As if that's not the problem.

Satan says to get a list of all the ones who have telephone cameras. Actually a good idea. Can't go near the hyenas – so called – as is. Had to lock 'em in steerage all week.

Rug rat did some good for once. Wall S.J. reporter has goods now on Boy Wonder. Fatties really hate him. I mean can't abide him. Living rebuke to their BBQ. She showed it to me on her transister when The Google wouldn't print. Going to bring the jerk on board, get some more angles from her. RR's idea – so called. Don't know why I'm paying Satan's helpers, their stuff's an embarrassment.

Next ad is going to be the big one though. R&D says News Boys will do it all for us for a pittance. Give The Snake a scoop. SB city this time for sure. Boy Wonder will never get off the mat, can't fatten himself up before DDay. Think I should label him Bean Pole at a friendly town hall, but SHelper says nix. What does he know?

Just occurred to me I gotta keep her highness home next week. If any jerk says HRH is a so called bean pole, she'll wig out the rest of summer. How do I explain that to her?

Back from the head. R&D says the Sunshine Boys are snarling about how I'm gonna lose Maricopa. One lousy poll. Bet the Spaghetti Bender is behind it. R&D wants me to go on KSAZ to give them the steely eye. Ain't gonna happen. Boy Wonder would spend all week talking about me on the defensive rather than whatever. HRH can do the rounds next week if she wants.

Bad enough we got to come back to this furnace every weekend. Not going anywhere.

Blogger Rodger Payne has discovered John McCain hoist by his own petard.

Turns out that until this month John McCain's presidential website had a post with laudatory excerpts from a much longer March 1, 2007 AP report about McCain's announcement on the David Letterman Show that he's running for president. The McCain website excerpt included this statement:

A political celebrity, McCain is considered a top contender for the nomination.

The article at McCain's website was scrubbed sometime after July 11. McCain's operatives don't appear to know about Google cache.

McCain's campaign excerpted it, therefore they owned the mention of his 'celebrity'. And who but a celebrity would get a chance to announce his candidacy on the David Letterman Show? Now as soon as they decide to paint Barack Obama as a celebrity, they're trying to disown the AP report they once embraced.

This mention of McCain's 'celebrity', by contrast, they're willing to keep visible on the site. The article refers to McCain's 'celebrity' as a former POW, something McCain is never embarrassed to remind people of.

h/t