Thoughts on the Middle East, History, and Religion
Juan Cole is President of the Global Americana Institute
Campbell Brown of CNN asks McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds some hard questions about Sarah Palin's national security experience and refuses to let him get away with illogical and self-contradictory answers.
John McCain was furious (and no one can be furious the way he can) and cancelled his planned interview on CNN in a fit of pique.
posted by Juan Cole @ 9/03/2008 12:15:00 AM
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Winner, October 5, 2007, Scott Nearing Award for Courageous Scholarship (Awarded by the Graduate Students of the Political Science Department, University of Pennsylvania).
Winner, 2005 James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism, Hunter College.
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the War on Terror
6 Comments:
Dear Professor Cole
Stratfor explains this morning (there is a copyright waiver provided it is attributed)
We are pointing to very stark strategic choices. Continuing the war in the Islamic world has a much higher cost now than it did when it began, and Russia potentially poses a far greater threat to the United States than the Islamic world does. What might have been a rational policy in 2001 or 2003 has now turned into a very dangerous enterprise, because a hostile major power now has the option of making the U.S. position in the Middle East enormously more difficult.
If a U.S. settlement with Iran is impossible, and a diplomatic solution with the Russians that would keep them from taking a hegemonic position in the former Soviet Union cannot be reached, then the United States must consider rapidly abandoning its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and redeploying its forces to block Russian expansion. The threat posed by the Soviet Union during the Cold War was far graver than the threat posed now by the fragmented Islamic world. In the end, the nations there will cancel each other out, and militant organizations will be something the United States simply has to deal with. This is not an ideal solution by any means, but the clock appears to have run out on the American war in the Islamic world.
We do not expect the United States to take this option. It is difficult to abandon a conflict that has gone on this long when it is not yet crystal clear that the Russians will actually be a threat later. (It is far easier for an analyst to make such suggestions than it is for a president to act on them.) Instead, the United States will attempt to bridge the Russian situation with gestures and half measures.
Nevertheless, American national strategy is in crisis. The United States has insufficient power to cope with two threats and must choose between the two. Continuing the current strategy means choosing to deal with the Islamic threat rather than the Russian one, and that is reasonable only if the Islamic threat represents a greater danger to American interests than the Russian threat does. It is difficult to see how the chaos of the Islamic world will cohere to form a global threat. But it is not difficult to imagine a Russia guided by the Medvedev Doctrine rapidly becoming a global threat and a direct danger to American interests.
We expect no immediate change in American strategic deployments -- and we expect this to be regretted later. However, given U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney's trip to the Caucasus region, now would be the time to see some movement in U.S. foreign policy. If Cheney isn't going to be talking to the Russians, he needs to be talking to the Iranians. Otherwise, he will be writing checks in the region that the U.S. is in no position to cash.
This is going to make the battle for Kirkk and the Kurdistan war far more interesting.
I expect the Vice Presidential candidates can illuminate us on the options on offer and their proposed way forward.
I watched that interview and by the time it was over I was furious. It was clear Brown was trying to smear Palin. And, at the end, Brown very coyly remarked that she was just trying to get to know who Palin is! BS I've never heard any of the MSM stations question Barack Obama's qualification. I had to go to the internet and do my own research to find out who he is, and the results aren't pretty. Brown, along with the rest of CNN (perhaps with the exception of Lou Dobbs) applies different standards when it comes to the coverage of the Democrats and the Republicans. For the first time in my life I will be voting Republican! McCain/Palin08
And I will not be watching anything on CNN except perhaps Lou Dobbs.
Well, yes and no.
Tucker whatever his name is came out with his mantra about how "experienced" and "sage" [my quotation marks] blah blah blah "John McCain" is...and the CNN cutie said, "we know all that about John Mc..." before pressing on with the "searching" questioning about Palin. But in fact, "we" "don't know all that" about McCain.
Yet another (one of millions) rivet in the MSM's "manufacture of consent" tower - its "unarguable" 'case' that McCain's the right man.
However desperate they are for a few crumbs of fairness and balance from the completely corrupted - let alone broken beyond repair - from the MSM, "liberals" shouldn't - ever - lose sight of the howlingly obvious "subtext". It's a constant drip, drip, drip...
It's less pique than an excuse. McCain hasn't been looking so great in interviews lately. The Republicans are going to go into the last two months of the election with neither person on their ticket willing to take live questions.
RE: Stratfor commentary via eurofrank:
If the United States were self-sufficient in energy and transportation fuel what "threat" would Russia, or the Islamic states for that matter pose to America?
Rather than trillions of dollars dedicated to the perpetual development of new weapons systems and hardware it seems rather more logical to devote that money to research and proven technologies that would accomplish American energy and fuel independence when implemented on a mass scale.
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