The President tells us the war in Iraq is over. It sounds a little hollow considering all the US forces still there, but we have to remember some things end with a whimper not a bang. This one has been dribbling toward an inconclusive end for some time now and the exact point at which we say it has ended is not all that important. The important thing is that the American people recognize that we have been conned by a group of swindlers into the worst debacle (so far) in the history of our nation's relations with the rest of the world. So my principal sentiment as we emerge from this sorry mess is that I hope that we the American people have learned a lesson or two.

The first lesson is that efforts by elected officials and their staffs to politicize the intelligence process should be universally considered as odious and a crime against the American people. It is a new and noisy world we enter and if we do so blindfolded only more catastrophes can be expected. This should be obvious.

The second lesson should be that democratization is an evolutionary process that takes time and has to grow from the ground up. Prefabricated solutions made in the USA simply do not work. I am not oversimplifying, I have been with this development process in one way or another for over fifty years now and know whereof I speak. When that ass Jerry Bremer was made our proconsul in Baghdad he behaved with all the subtlety of the proverbial bull in the china shop, and everything we have done since then has been patchwork, bandaids applied to the wounds he and his buddies inflicted after the shooting was over.

The third lesson is that we should apply the second lesson to what we are doing in Afghanistan, and get the hell out.

Thank you for your patience.

Just about every informed comment I have seen in the last few days sees the upcoming US-brokered peace talks between Abbas and Netanyahu as foredoomed to failure. More of the same, my colleagues sigh, another round certifying the irroncilable nature of positions both sides are frozen into by political realities. It's a charade where each party requires the appearance of action, while knowing that no real breakthrough is possible.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and predict we may in fact have an October surprise, a breakthrough on the settlements issue. It would go like this: Abbas agrees in principle that the major settlements remain in Israeli hands in return for a land swap in the south. Netanyahu agrees in principle that the outlying settlements have to go, eventually, and that for the time being the settlement freeze will continue to apply to them. This will not in itself describe a new high road to a solution of competing territorial claims (regarding East Jerusalem, for example) but it will be enough for both sides, and particularly for the Obama administration, to declare victory. 

Cynics will suggest that this is a lot farther than Bibi can afford to go, or believes he needs to go. Not to mention problems on the Palestian side. But Obama badly needs the appearance of motion this fall, and we don't know how much heat he has applied to Bibi in private talks. (Or what he has promised Bibi in return for cooperation on this issue.) The fact is that every party to the dispute needs a breakthrough of sorts for its own reasons. This outcome could provide a win-win reprieve that would be in everybody's interest.

I am not saying this is going to happen. If I were at the race track I'd see it as about a 20 to 1 long shot. But sometimes long shots pay off. If this one does, remember, you read it here before it happened.

Carl Coon

Our Relations with Turkey, Another Tipping Point?

The August 15 Financial Times reports that “...Obama has personally warned Turkey’s prime minister that unless Ankara shifts its position on Israel and Iran it stands little chance of obtaining the US weapons it wants to buy...” Read on into the report and Obama's message becomes more nuanced: no direct threat but concern about difficulties with Congress over pending weapons sales, and so forth. But let there be no mistake, later in the report an administration spokesman spells it out more clearly: Turkey better get back in step, or else. This comes at a time when Turkey wants to buy some of our drones to cope with PKK units based in mountain retreats in northern Iraq.

Israel's clout in Congress is generally recognized and of course the Turks recognize it too. I doubt that they will throw a public hissy fit over this. Byzantine diplomacy reached its finest flower in what is now Turkey, after all. The odds are that they will find subtle ways to express their displeasure, measures that will hurt but not resonate in the media. The key question for me is whether they will be satisfied with a few such measures, or whether the present rebuff will push them toward reconsidering the fundamental question of what they are and what they want to become. Is their goal to be a southeastern bastion of Europe, or an emerging major power in Central Asia? If this “warning” by our President helps tip them away from the European to the Central Asian option, then the ultimate price we shall pay for this small favor to our Israeli mistress will be very high. And it will be even higher for Israel.

The European option is an implant, created by the genius of Ataturk less than a century ago. The other option, eastward-looking, is based on the country's history and religion, and a growing number of Turkish voters support it. The country is split down the middle at this point, and it could go either way. It is at a tipping point, where relatively small issues can have a disproportionate influence on the course of history. Usually it is foolish to make mountains out of molehills, but this is a case where events in a molehill could actually move a mountain.

The Turks have been loyal friends and allies since the Korean War and before. I could develop this theme at much greater length, and demonstrate that they have done a great deal to enhance our security and general welfare in the last fifty years or so. But what's the point? Every Turk knows that his country has been our steadfast ally for his whole life, but if we demonstrate that we are prepared to forget all this history to throw a bone to Israel, he is going to devalue that friendship, perhaps to the point it becomes disposable. And that would be serious.

I don't know any more about the Shahram Amiri case than what was in the newspapers, but I have had a personal  experience that may provide a precedent.

Today's Christian Science Monitor ( per Truthout) reports that during several attacks during the last twenty-four hours, the Taliban managed to kill another eight American soldiers. The report suggests that this is consistent with a buildup in the scale and effectiveness of such attacks that is becoming increasingly apparent.

In recent months our strategy has been well publicized: we commit a substantial number of additional troops in order to hurt the enemy enough so that he will be disposed to quit, or at least negotiate on our terms. We call it "the surge", which worked, at least in theory, in Iraq.

It looks like Taliban is giving us its answer. They can surge too. Given the terrain, our logistic problems, and the other major factors, and the nature of our adversary, it looks to be a tough year ahead for our GI's. The end result has to be coming to the negotiating table, and when that happens, which surge will prove to have been more effective? I don't know. And which surge will have cost more? That is not in doubt.

Define "victory". And at what price?

General McChrystal's Rolling Stone article was the ostensible reason for his getting sacked but an even more important factor may have been press reports attributed to him and his staff that were leaked earlier in June. They painted a bleak picture about how the war was going. The much touted Marja offensive was a flop and the forthcoming push within Kandahar was being postponed for lack of support from the Afghan side. Presumably McChrystal was preparing the ground for an effort to persuade Obama to retreat from his deadline for future troop drawdowns. Or could he, just possibly, have been telling an unwelcome truth? In either case, he was "off message" for the political managers in Washington. The Rolling Stone article can thus be seen as the straw that broke the camel's back, rather than the prime cause of his dismissal.

Petraeus has been more adroit, assuring his Congressional inquisitors that yes there is a problem but my goodness, of course I fully support the President's deadline. This sounds like typical political pandering to a power elite in Washington so mesmerized by its own importance that it has become almost oblivious to what is actually going on in the rest of the world. Calling a circle square, and vice versa, has been elevated to a fine art in our nation's capital. And particularly during the period preceding an election that is even more important than usual.

In my opinion the offensive in Marja has been a dismal failure and just about everything else about our so-called war in Afghanistan has gone sour. There's a lot of evidence to this effect and very little on the other side. Even the American public is beginning to sense that things aren't going our way. Is it possibe that pretty soon we'll see a gradual, subtle series of moves toward disengagement? Is it possible that Obama himself is inching laboriously in that direction, despite his fervent public proclamations about staying the course? Could the clever, highly articulate Petraeus be in effect a kind of accessory in this? One can only hope.

It is not born losers who fold a losing hand at poker, saving the resources they need to stay in the game. The losers are the ones who are too stubborn to fold. 

Obama's speech from the Oval Office, about the Gulf oil crisis, has been widely greeted as a disappointment, criticized from the the left as well as from the right. Now that I've read the text, I fail to see the rationale for this reaction. It looked like a good speech to me, with all the necessary ingredients concisely set forth, starting with a diagnosis of the present problem, proceeding to a prescription, and on to a look at the larger issue of breaking our long-term dependence on oil. What was missing? Churchillian prose, perhaps, that would sweep the citizen off his feet, mesmerize him with rhetorical flourishes? No, I suspect that too would have been disdained by most of the critics.

The long saga of human evolution has reached a turning point.

Are we at the end of the beginning, or the beginning of the end?

It's up to us.