Saudi Arabia wants lower petroleum prices. As a country with enormous reserves, Riyadh would like to preserve their value. In contrast, countries like Algeria with relatively shallow reserves want to get top dollar for their petroleum while it lasts.
Businessweek provides the telling quote:
‘ Any threat to oil’s leading role as a source of energy is a big worry for a country that sits on reserves of some 260 billion barrels. “We are concerned about the permanent destruction of demand,” says a senior Saudi official. “Those who buy hybrid vehicles are not going back to SUVs.” ‘
One of the things that struck me about Friday night’s debate on the time line for troop withdrawal was that McCain appeared to believe that how long US troops remain in Iraq and at what strength is a unilateral matter dictated by Washington. The government of prime minister Nuri al-Maliki is already trying to negotiate a timetable for US withdrawal as part of the proposed security agreement. A majority of parliament certainly supports a timetable.
There is even less tolerance for a long term foreign troop presence among ordinary Iraqis, thousands of whom have lost relatives to US military operations. Aljazeera English reports on the death of a respected Iraqi academic in Baquba, shot at a US checkpoint.
One exception to this yearning to see the Americans go is the some of the Kurds, who as a minority trying to remain independent of Baghdad and able to confront Turkey. Some Kurds would very much like to keep US troops in Iraq. This Kurdish aspiration explains Iraqi foreign minister Hoshyar Zebari’s continual announcements about there being no timetable in the security agreement. Clearly, the Shiite Arabs do want a timetable.
‘ Couric: In preparing for this conversation, a lot of our viewers … and Internet users wanted to know why you did not get a passport until last year. And they wondered if that indicated a lack of interest and curiosity in the world.
Palin: I’m not one of those who maybe came from a background of, you know, kids who perhaps graduate college and their parents give them a passport and give them a backpack and say go off and travel the world.
No, I’ve worked all my life. In fact, I usually had two jobs all my life until I had kids. I was not a part of, I guess, that culture. The way that I have understood the world is through education, through books, through mediums that have provided me a lot of perspective on the world.’
she went to college for a while in Hawaii!. Do you know how long it takes to fly to Hawaii from Alaska? And do you know how expensive it is to live in Hawaii? Milk is $5 a gallon (not many places to put cows on the islands, so it is imported).
It is a five and a half hour flight from Anchorage to Honolulu, i.e. an hour less than the flight from JFK to London.
So Palin seemed to have money to gallivant around plenty, hopping from college to college over 6 years. Maybe she held down part time jobs as an undergraduate. So do lots of people. Studies show that such students get better grades because they have to organize their time.
I just don’t think she was interested.
And, if you think she ever read any books about foreign countries, raise your hand.
About that claim by McCain that he warned about the mortgage crisis:
McCain: “But — but let me — let me point out, I also warned about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and warned about corporate greed and excess, and CEO pay, and all that. A lot of us saw this train wreck coming.”
‘ “One should be prepared to negotiate, and I think we should be prepared to negotiate about Iran,” Kissinger . . . said in an interview with Bloomberg Television. Asked whether he meant the U.S. should hold direct talks, Kissinger, 84, responded: “Yes, I think we should.” . . . ‘
Not only did he advocate such talks, he personally engaged in them!
‘ “I’ve been in semi-private, totally private talks with Iranians,” he said. “They’ve had put before them approaches that with a little flexibility on their part would, in my view, surely lead to negotiations.” ‘
Kissinger added:
‘ “It’s not really the willingness to talk, it’s so far the inability to define what we are trying to accomplish,” Kissinger said. “The negotiations depend on a balance of incentives and penalties. Have we got those right at every point? Not at every point.” . . . The Nobel Peace Prize winner said any direct talks between the U.S. and Iran on issues such as the nuclear dispute would be most likely to succeed if they first involved only diplomatic staff and progressed to the level of secretary of state before the heads of state meet.’
So Kissinger envisaged the heads of state meeting. N.B. that would be the US president and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (Ahmadinejad as president is a lesser figure in the Iranian system.)
Kissinger did advise a progression from lower level to higher level, despite his call for no pre-conditions.
Kissinger didn’t seem embarrassed at all by the kind of considerations McCain instanced in the debate, of legitimating the Iranian government and the way it talks dirty about Israel by a US president’s meeting with its top leaders.
The difference is that Kissinger is a foreign policy realist and McCain is surrounding himself with Neoconservatives.
For Pakistan and the controversy over McCain’s ridiculous assertion that Pakistan was a ‘failed state’ in 1999 when Musharraf made his coup, see my “McCain’s Holiday from History” from last February (the terms of the debate between McCain and Obama on these issues, interestingly hasn’t changed).
But one thing that has changed is that Pakistan made its transition from military to civilian rule, a transition McCain was not enthusiastic about– he supported military dictator Pervez Musharraf.
By the way, Nawaz Sharif, the former prime minister against whom Musharraf made the coup, is the leader of the major opposition party in parliament, the Muslim League. Isn’t McCain dissing Nawaz Sharif big time, equating his term as prime minister with Somalia? Moreover, Musharraf kept the current president of Pakistan, Asaf Ali Zardari, in prison for several years and threatened his wife, Benazir Bhutto, with a jail sentence as well, as a way of keeping civilian politicians out of power.
Given this ‘failed state’ allegation against the civilian politicians now in power in Pakistan, hasn’t McCain just screwed up any chance he had of a close working relationship with the new government?
I mean, it would be like saying that dictator Leonid Kuchma of the Ukraine was doing his best and had to act as he did in cracking down on dissent in the Ukraine because it was a failed state, and then saying you hope to have a good working relationship with dissident activist and now president Viktor Yushchenko today! (McCain probably would have adopted that stance if Kuchma had been a right-wing dictator instead of a Soviet holdover.
And, imagine, McCain accused Obama of poisoning relations with Pakistan by saying he’d take the shot at Bin Laden if we found him!
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