Political Potpourri

Assuring Victory in Afghanistan

2010-05-30T16:21:00.000-04:00

The failed Mayday bombing incident in Times Square exposed the involvement of the Pakistan Taliban in a jihadist plot against the United States. Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad, a naturalized American citizen, was apparently distraught over collateral damage caused by Predator drones along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Increasingly in the past year, disgruntled Pakistani-Americans have made various attempts to avenge for stepped-up drone attacks in the critical AfPak border area. This latest effort – another foiled attack on the homeland – brings a new sense of urgency to our overall mission in the Afghan theater of operations.

A recent New York Times editorial lamented that

“Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top commander in Afghanistan, has a clear military strategy. We are less certain about the administration’s political strategy.”

It should be pretty obvious to anyone that if these two strategies are not in sync, failure is no longer an option, but becomes almost certain. We were experiencing a similar situation in Iraq until late 2006, when Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was fired and the current Defense Secretary Robert Gates took charge. Secretary Gates quickly aligned the Bush Administration’s political strategy namely, to defeat the insurgency and stabilize Iraq, with its military strategy, which was to surge forces with a clear, hold and build objective – and, thus ensured success. Today, the U.S. is on target to withdraw most of its combat troops from Iraq by late summer.

More curiously, the Times editorial appeared to have analyzed the Karzai problem strictly within the confines of Afghanistan, ignoring its larger geopolitical context. Pakistan’s influence on the outcome in Afghanistan is as much, if not more relevant than, what Iran’s influence would have been to the outcome in Iraq without the surge. President Karzai’s weakness is, in part, due to the Pakistani military’s ongoing covert relationship with the Afghan Taliban.

The Obama administration’s political strategy in Afghanistan is thus compounded by the “what do we do about Pakistan” factor? Gen. McChrystal will not be able to effectively clear, hold and build in Afghanistan until President Obama delivers an enforceable ultimatum to the Pakistan military’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency. President Obama should warn the ISI in no uncertain terms to cease and desist from further meddling in Afghanistan – a good start would be to give the Pakistan military a deadline to begin its much-delayed operations in North Waziristan to flush out all of the Al Qaeda and Taliban leadership. Only then, can President Obama seriously expect to achieve his own goal of starting to withdraw American troops from Afghanistan by mid-2011.

Ahmed Rashid, a Pakistani journalist, wrote recently in the Washington Post about the selfsame Pakistan factor. Mr. Rashid’s analysis of the dilemma facing the United States boiled down to “Karzai vs. the ISI.” Even he acknowledged that Pakistan is trying to influence the outcome in Afghanistan to its advantage. The ISI is again hedging dangerously with respect to the Taliban – turning against them at home to satisfy the U.S., but coddling them in Afghanistan to counter the Indians.

The bottom line is just as the “Sunni Awakening” preceded the Iraqi surge, the U.S. needs to feverishly work with Karzai on a “Taliban Awakening” in Afghanistan to guarantee the success of the surge there. The United States cannot let the ISI dictate the terms of its Afghan policy; else it is bound to fail. Pakistan must focus its energies internally to rid itself of a compounding “Jihadi” menace; else it will continue to degenerate into chaos akin to a Somalia of the subcontinent – a situation that would not be beneficial to the world at large. Pakistan must accept the role of the Predator drone in today’s war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban leadership as it did the role of the Stinger missile launcher in yesteryear’s war against the Soviets – as a necessary instrument to drive out foreign fighters from Afghanistan. Only then can Afghanistan achieve a lasting peace with a stable government.

Eight in ’08 – Crude Summer, Black Fall!

2010-05-21T13:56:00.000-04:00

I have been unable to post a new blog in the past couple of months due to various commitments. Nonetheless, I discovered eight wonderful commentaries that I had written back in 2008 and posted on the “Syndicated News” web site. They were penned during a sizzling summer, shortly after the price of crude oil hit a record high of $147.27 in July 2008 and during a black fall, when in a single week the Dow Jones Industrial Average plummeted 1,874 points, or 18%, in its worst weekly decline ever on both a point and percentage basis.

Some of these essays on our fragile political, economic and foreign policy landscape at that time, now seem quite prescient, if I might say so myself. I wish mainstream pundits would review their writings from a couple of years ago to see if they had the requisite foresight on some of the pressing issues of the day. As the saying goes, hindsight is 20/20, but it’s foresight that really qualifies you as a pundit. So here are the links to my syndicated efforts from that turbulent period in 2008:

In the War on Terrorism: A Passage Through India (8/14/2008)

Can a new, expanded NATO avert Cold War II? (8/21/2008)

Obama-Biden his time, as McCain-Palin to irrelevance! (9/3/2008)

Victory in Iraq (9/8/2008)

The Great Regression (9/30/2008)

For U.S. Foreign Policy: A "New Clear" Passage Through India (10/20/2008)

The Political Pendulum: Swinging To Liberalism (10/27/2008)

Too Much, Too Little, Too Late From The Fed: We Are All Keynesians Now! (10/30/2008)

So do I qualify as a pundit?

New START be damned, it’s the beginning of the END… an END to Armageddon!

2010-03-27T19:17:00.000-04:00

In its March 27th editorial, “A worthy U.S.-Russia arms control treaty,” the Washington Post calls the new arms control agreement “a solid diplomatic achievement” for President Obama. While it is great to hear that the U.S. and Russia have agreed to slash their nuclear arsenals to the lowest levels in half a century, the reality is that the original START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) was signed in 1991 towards the end of the Cold War!

Five years earlier, President Reagan had remarked privately to his Secretary of State, George Schultz, “Why wait until the end of the century for a world free of nuclear weapons?” Ten years into the new millennium and we are nowhere close to what President Obama more recently called as “a world without nuclear weapons." Nonetheless, the current accord is being dubbed a “New START” and the White House emphasized that this new treaty does not in any way restrict U.S. missile defense plans.

Meanwhile Defense Secretary, Robert Gates, at a White House Press Briefing on March 26th, made it clear that

“I don’t think anybody expects us to come anywhere close to zero nuclear weapons anytime soon.”

So I have a symbolic gesture that could go a long way to show the world that we are indeed serious about a nuclear weapons-free world. Given that over the past two decades, we have had a successful START I, followed by an un-ratified START II, and now another New START – I would imagine we should be way beyond the starting gate at this point. I therefore humbly suggest to President Obama that the new treaty be called END as in Eliminating the Nuclear Deterrent.

Symbolism plays a big role in the politics of the Middle East and Asia, where we face the biggest threat of nuclear proliferation. In fact, the Post concludes its March 27th editorial by lamenting that “it’s hard to see how new treaties will bring about the disarmament of North Korea or stop Tehran’s centrifuges.” If the U.S. and Russia were to sign an END Treaty, as opposed to a New START Treaty, we might just signal to the world that the end game is actually in sight. Also, in the age of the Internet and social media that demands remarkable content with catchy headlines, an “END to Armageddon” makes for one memorable tweet! But seriously, the END treaty will likely gain more popular acceptance because as the old adage goes “well begun is half done.” So, Mr. President, please let’s make it the END.

Life, Liberty and the pursuit of “Universal Healthcare”

2010-03-23T20:29:00.002-04:00

It was barely a week ago that the Wall Street Journal published my letter, “Stock Markets Reflect Nation's Monetary And Fiscal Policies,” in which I had posited that

“if the Dow has gained 62% since its March 9, 2009, low, I would expect that the markets have done this after digesting the realities of President Obama's $787 billion stimulus package, his pending $1 trillion health-care bill, his projected $1.6 trillion budget deficit for fiscal 2010, and the end of the Bush tax cuts in 2011, etc.”

A few days later on Sunday night, I was watching the House debate ObamaCare and I could literally see history repeating itself. The last time Republicans voted lock, stock and barrel against a signature Democratic initiative by a near identical margin was the Clinton Administration’s Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993. Back then, the GOP had predicted similar dire consequences of a deep recession, significant job losses and horrendous deficits – by the time the 1990s ended, we had actually achieved diametrically opposite results!

Nonetheless, it was with trepidation that I waited for the markets to react on Monday to the reality of ObamaCare. The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) had closed at 10735 on Friday evening and when it dipped 40 points at Monday’s opening bell, my heart sank. But that initial dip was more related to overnight trends in overseas markets according to most analysts. By the end of the day on Monday, the DJIA eventually closed up 50 points at 10785. On Tuesday, President Obama signed ObamaCare, officially known as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, into law. Lo and behold, the DJIA went up another 100 odd points and closed at 10889. In fact, all three major stock market indices –S&P 500, Nasdaq composite, and DJIA–are now at 18 to 19 month highs!

So after nearly a century of trying, Democrats finally made a new, bold declaration of independence that we are indeed endowed with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of “Universal Healthcare.” At the end of the day, the American people are going to realize that Democratic presidents have always delivered on the seminal issues of our times including Social Security, Civil Rights, Voting Rights, Medicare and now Healthcare Reform.

As President Obama gets ready to hit the road to enlighten the American people on the immediate benefits that will flow from ObamaCare, it is imperative that he links the economics of healthcare to the future health of our economy. Also, he can make a simple case to his skeptics – wider coverage, healthier people, more economic output, and hence more jobs. It’s a “trickle down” argument that even conservatives will appreciate.

Finally on a lighter note, the passage of ObamaCare comes with fringe benefits such as self-imposed exile to Costa Rica for some prominent naysayers, the repudiation of tea over coffee as the quintessential American beverage, and hopefully the defeat of fear-mongering as a political tactic by deep-pocketed interests groups! Republicans might want to think twice about running on a repeal platform because a brand new USA Today/Gallup poll out today shows that Americans by a 49%-40% margin already favor ObamaCare as “a good thing.” Once the people get used to a good thing, they are not likely to give it up and candidates promising to take it away could face voter backlash – to be forewarned is to be forearmed! Let the healing begin!

Mossad on the Move

2010-03-18T18:16:00.000-04:00

There has been much brouhaha in the media of late about an Israel vs. United States sparring contest. Following Vice President Biden’s recent contentious visit to Israel, Thomas L. Friedman of the New York Times went apoplectic in his March 14th column, “Driving Drunk in Jerusalem.” He accused Israel of making it “look like America’s most dependent ally can push” us around. Then Robert Kagan got into the act with a contrarian viewpoint that not only empathized with Israel but also was more scathing in his judgment of President Obama’s overall foreign policy. In his March 17th column in the Washington Post, “Allies everywhere feeling snubbed by President Obama,” Mr. Kagan suggested that “Israelis shouldn't feel that they have been singled out.”

On the same day, John Bolton, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, spouted his usual hawkish tone in the Wall Street Journal. In “Israel and The Crisis With Obama,” Mr. Bolton pointed out that “Israel has sought to accommodate Mr. Obama on two critical issues: negotiations with Palestinians and Iranian nuclear weapons.” After glossing over the distraction of the Israeli settlements, Mr. Bolton reiterated his long-held position that “Americans must realize that allowing Iran to obtain nuclear weapons is empowering an existential threat to the Israeli state, to Arab governments in the region that are friendly to the U.S., and to long-term global peace and security.”

I suspect that a lot of Americans already recognize that a nuclear-armed Iran is a serious threat to world peace given some of the vile pronouncements of its holocaust-denying leaders. So let me expand on a conspiracy theory that I believe is playing out right now in the Middle East. First, it is almost impossible to believe that Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu was blindsided by his own Interior ministry during Vice President Biden’s recent visit. Second, the Israelis are too smart to expect anyone to believe as much. Thus, per their master plan, Israel’s Mossad began by intentionally blindsiding the British government with their infamous Dubai operation in January – assassinating a prominent Hamas leader using British identities – and is now making it appear like they can push the United States around as well.

This “modern-day David taking on two western Goliaths back-to-back" is a staged precursor to an imminent Israeli action aimed at taking out relevant Iranian nuclear facilities – without giving Iran any reason to suspect any involvement of the traditional Anglo-American alliance. If the Israeli airstrikes are successful, they will simultaneously achieve both of Mr. Bolton’s stated objectives and additionally contribute to a more favorable outcome in Iraq. It seems to me that Mossad is on the move – setting the stage for what Mr. Bolton has been propagating for a long time, which is “a pre-emptive strike against Iran's nuclear program.” Israel recognizes that such action is the only way to achieve a lasting Middle East peace because it will:

1. Neutralize the Iranian threat and its ascendancy much to the satisfaction of the Arab nations and leadership in the Middle East.
2. Force the Palestinian leadership to jettison “proximity talks” in favor of “direct talks” with them towards a permanent peace settlement.
3. Ensure that Iran will no longer influence the formation of a pro-Iranian government in Iraq following recently concluded parliamentary elections there.

Americans can only hope that Israel gets it right this time just as it did with its pre-emptive strike on Iraq’s Osirak nuclear facility back in 1981. Two decades later, we were unable to find WMD in Iraq in large part due to that prescient action. If the United Nations cannot convince Iran to abandon its pursuit of WMD, maybe the mighty arm of the Mossad will?

Yoo Must Be Kidding... but Toensing is not!

2010-03-09T15:12:00.005-05:00

John Yoo, who is a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley and a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, was a Justice Department official from 2001-03 during the tumultuous post-9/11 years. Mr. Yoo became famous for co-authoring legal memos that saw the evolution of “enhanced interrogations techniques.”

In the February 24th edition of the Wall Street Journal, Mr. Yoo penned a rather pompous commentary, "My Gift to President Obama.” While Mr. Yoo might possess a great legal mind, it is definitely not suffused with humility. Despite being put off by his opening salvo, “Barack Obama may not realize it, but I may have just helped save his presidency,” I still read through his entire hubristic essay.

Most of his diatribe was dedicated to problems with the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), who ran an extended investigation into the CIA's detention and interrogation methods that had evolved from Mr. Yoo’s afore-mentioned legal opinions. In his lengthy invective, Mr. Yoo failed to address President Obama’s basic proposition, which rejects “as false the choice between our safety and our ideals,” and which Mr. Yoo even acknowledged upfront in his article.

Subsequently, Victoria Toensing, a deputy assistant attorney general in the Reagan administration (1984-88) and chief counsel for the Senate Intelligence Committee (1981-84), got into the act. In the March 2nd edition of the Wall Street Journal, Ms. Toensing followed up Mr. Yoo’s generous bestowal on President Obama with her take on the subject in "KSM Deserves Military Justice” – even contradicting President Reagan on this issue!

She began by acknowledging that “In the 1980s, the Reagan administration established a policy for trying terrorists in civilian courts.” And then added “I know the basis for its policy of trying terrorists in federal courts—and why it is no longer applicable.” She then went on to provide a lengthy historical but unconvincing argument – citing the case of Mohammed Ali Hamadi, one of the terrorists involved in the June 1985 hijacking of TWA Flight 847, which resulted in the murder of U.S. Navy diver Robert Stethem. Mr. Hamadi was tried, convicted, jailed and released after a lengthy term by the German court system.

By comparison, her other citation “so-called 20th 9/11 hijacker Zacarious Moussaoui,” was tried by the U.S. criminal justice system and sentenced to six life terms without the chance of parole – a sentence he is now serving in a Supermax prison in Colorado. Nevertheless, Ms. Toensing concluded her article by saying, “We now have a system that provides due process while recognizing there are differences between enemy combatants and bank robbers. We should use it.” One wonders if Zacarious Moussaoui feels like a petty “bank robber” following his lifetime incarceration by the U.S. criminal justice system.

My point is that we are ill-served by ideologues on both sides of this debate, who insist on this false dichotomy between the abilities of our criminal justice system and what Mr. Yoo called “the president’s constitutional ability to fight the enemies that threaten our nation today.” Neither approach in and of its own is sacrosanct and sufficient – executing and winning this war on terrorism will require a judicious application of both, constitutionally granted executive power and the use of our world-famous legal system.

To conclude in the tenor of the Yoo-Toensing debate… So Let It Be Written, So Let It Be Done!

Google Me Once, Shame on You; Google Me Twice or More and Make the Google God Happy…

2010-03-02T10:36:00.021-05:00

With apologies to President George W. Bush, I mangle that old adage even more to make a point. In this era of Search Engine Optimization and Social Media, it is becoming imperative for the LinkedIn individual to also show up on Facebook and Twitter as required ̶ for me it’s more about trying to control my online exposure (i.e., my digital footprint) than mere socializing (or as we still call it in the business world ̶ networking ̶ but that’s a topic for another day).

Nonetheless, to have any effective say on my digital footprint online, I would have to battle the Google God, which I know I cannot. Sidebar: How about I coin a new pet name for the Google God right now – the GooGod (one pronounces the name so that it almost sounds like “Good God” with the middle D silent!)

Now, back to my feeble attempt to appease the GooGod ̶ in the laundry list below, I am linking to the media that have published me in the past several years. Folks, feel free to click away on the links below and help the good stuff rise in the SERPs ̶ go ahead and Google me twice or more, so that the GooGod makes me look nice for sure! If that doesn’t work, I’ll go back to what good old Popeye used to say, “I yam what I yam” and live with it.

Jack Nargundkar in the New York Times on February 20, 2010, "An Apology, for What It’s Worth”

Jack Nargundkar in the International Herald Tribune on February 7, 2010, "A Shift for U.S. Foreign Policy”

Jack Nargundkar in the Wall Street Journal on January 22, 2010, "Lessons to Learn From Scott Brown's 'Tea Party'"

Jack Nargundkar in the Washington Post on December 31, 2009, "Navigating the nation's course after Flight 253"

Jack Nargundkar in the Wall Street Journal on November 21, 2009, "A Compromise on Muslim Freedom"

Jack Nargundkar in the New York Times on October 10, 2009, "Barack Obama, Nobel Peace Laureate”

Jack Nargundkar in the Washington Post on August 26, 2009, "A Changing Tide on the Wars"

Jack Nargundkar in the Business Week on May 1, 2009, “Securing Government Contracts”

Jack Nargundkar in Digital Signage Today on January 21, 2009, “Broadband creates digital signage opportunities in the SMB market”

Jack Nargundkar in the New York Times on January 20, 2009, "President Obama: A Day of Uplift”

Jack Nargundkar in the Wall Street Journal on September 27, 2008, "Is Marking to Market the Problem or Part of Solution?"

Jack Nargundkar in the New York Times on August 24, 2008, "Russia, Georgia and the West”

Jack Nargundkar in the New York Times on April 14, 2008, "Do Asians Really Want a Red-State America?"

Jack Nargundkar in Digital Signage Today on March 24, 2008, “Digital signage strategies for small-to-medium businesses”

Jack Nargundkar in the Washington Post on November 6, 2007, "If Sen. Clinton Were President Clinton"

Jack Nargundkar in the Wall Street Journal on October 15, 2007, "Elections in Pakistan Don't Equal Democracy"

Jack Nargundkar in the New York Times on October 3, 2007, "Anita Hill vs. Clarence Thomas, Redux"

Jack Nargundkar in the New York Times on July 27, 2007, "What Do We Leave Behind in Iraq?"

Jack Nargundkar in the New York Times on June 22, 2007, "Vetoing Stem Cells, Vetoing Life"

Jack Nargundkar in the New York Times on March 8, 2007, "A Verdict for Libby, a Cloud for the White House"

Jack Nargundkar in the New York Times on November 3, 2006, "A Man, a Cab, a Cellphone, a Laptop"

Jack Nargundkar in the Wall Street Journal on October 24, 2006, "Counting War Dead Is Difficult -- Therefore, Let's Not Exaggerate"

Jack Nargundkar in the Wall Street Journal on October 6, 2006, "Musharraf May Be Our Fair-Haired Boy Now . . . But Watch Out"

Jack Nargundkar in the New York Times on September 4, 2006, "Are We Seeing a Half-Empty Glass?"

Jack Nargundkar in the Washington Post on July 29, 2006, "Still Dreaming"

Jack Nargundkar in the New York Times on March 8, 2006, "Bush and the Nuclear Subcontinent"

Jack Nargundkar in the New York Times on January 8, 2006, "Other Voices: How The Times Handled the Surveillance Story"

Jack Nargundkar in the Washington Post on April 11, 2005, "No Individual Blamed"

Jack Nargundkar in the New York Times on April 1, 2005, "A Life Ends, and a Nation Pauses to Reflect"

Jack Nargundkar in the New York Times on December 16, 2004, "Medals at Odds With Reality of War"

Jack Nargundkar in the Washington Post on May 27, 2004, "Punctuate a Comma Date"

Jack Nargundkar in the Washington Post on February 4, 2004, "Screening Bush: The Winners"

Jack Nargundkar in the Wall Street Journal on January 27, 2004, "Hey, Big Spender, Spend a Little Less"

Jack Nargundkar in the Business Week on December 29, 2003, "The Challenge From India"

Jack Nargundkar in the Washington Post on December 5, 2003, "'Cut and Run' and the Right Approach in Iraq"

Jack Nargundkar in the Wall Street Journal on May 2, 2003, "Don't Let Conservatives Define Liberals' Views"

Jack Nargundkar in the Washington Post on April 12, 2003, "Next Steps on Iraq"

Jack Nargundkar in the Wall Street Journal on January 8, 1998, "Behind ’90s Success Is Fiscal Discipline"

Jack Nargundkar in the Business Week on March 17, 1997," WEBCASTING: A FEW TANGLES"

Jack Nargundkar in the Business Week on October 25, 1993," THOUGHTS FOR CHAIRMAN GERSTNER"

Jack Nargundkar in the Wall Street Journal on August 12, 1993, "Dear Laura Tyson…"

Jack Nargundkar in the Wall Street Journal on October 19, 1992, "Reap the Silicon Whirlwind"

Jack Nargundkar in the Business Week on July 13, 1992," SELL THE GREEN CARD TO THE AVERAGE JOE"

Axis of Faith

2010-02-21T16:09:00.004-05:00

Mahatma Gandhi’s strategy of non-violence might have humbled the British empire of yesteryear, but such subtlety and discretion have little to no effect in this age of terrorism. India’s lack of a military response to the “26/11” Mumbai attacks might have gained it credibility in the western world but have made it appear weak and ineffective in its own backyard. China’s recent verbal saber-rattling over its long-standing border dispute with India is a case in point.

The world discerns between India’s post-26/11 fatalism and America’s post-9/11 realism. However, if India wants to be seriously considered as a major economic and military power in the 21st century, it needs to revamp its 20th century “non-aligned” foreign policy just like it overhauled its antiquated socialist economic model in 1991. India’s economic gains since then are clearly visible to the world; however, its inability to simultaneously defend itself against modern-day terrorism and communist China’s expansionist designs has the potential to mire it in an eternal crisis that can only suppress its growth as a 21st century power.

As far the United States is concerned, there are two significant reasons that it needs to revisit its Cold War foreign policy paradigm:

1. Thirty-odd years of economic engagement with China has not resulted in a concomitant shift in China’s totalitarian political structure – the U.S. should have embarked on a mid-course correction in its China policy shortly after the end of the Cold War in 1991. China’s unchecked power and blatant ambition could result in a New Cold War situation with the western world in the next couple of decades.
2. After the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989, the U.S. not only abandoned Pakistan, but further slapped it with the Pressler Amendment sanctions – which banned most economic and military assistance to Pakistan unless the President certified annually that Pakistan did not possess nuclear weapons. Any attempt to mollify Pakistan after two decades of neglect will eventually prove to be a waste of time and energy – the Pakistani people no longer trust the U.S. and never will.

Notwithstanding Pakistan’s current offensive against its own homegrown Taliban, it remains a fragile democracy that can be usurped at any time by its powerful military. As soon as President Obama starts winding down military operations in Afghanistan next year, we will see an attendant increase in Pakistan’s meddlesome activities along its eastern border with India. Based on China’s ongoing problems with the United States and India, Pakistan must already be hedging its bets – by renewing old ties with and seeking longer term refuge under Beijing’s expanding Asia-Pacific umbrella.

Thus, in this rapidly evolving new power structure, it only makes sense that the U.S. seek stronger ties with like-minded nations in the Asia-Pacific region – that go beyond its traditional Cold War allies such as Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and South Korea. It is imperative for the United States and India to become more closely aligned from a political, economic, technological and military standpoint. Keeping the world’s oldest and largest democracies together – in a new long term “axis of faith” partnership – should become the foundation of 21st century U.S. foreign policy.

Pallin Around With Palin

2008-10-12T16:34:00.009-04:00

It was a month ago on 9/11 that I posted my imaginary interview (see “The Real McCoy”) with Senator McCain. Since then, his running mate, Governor Palin flubbed a few sit-downs with ABC’s Charlie Gibson and CBS’ Katie Couric. Consequently, the McCain campaign decided that Palin was off limits to the mainstream media until after the election. However, the American public was given to understand that Governor Palin would still meet with conservative and small town wannabe journalists. Unfortunately, I am not your average Joe Sixpack pundit that the Governor would be comfortable with. In fact, I am that potent combination of a liberal with an Ivy League graduate degree – so I am pretty sure that she won’t talk to me. Alas, as I did with Senator McCain, I need to fake my interview with the lovely Ms. Palin. So here goes…

Jack: It’s a pleasure to meet you in person…

Sarah Palin: Can we get started? I have half-a-dozen of you wannabes lined up this morning, and you are only my first.

Jack: OK! Back in June you told Larry Kudlow of CNBC that you were not sure “what is it exactly that the VP does every day?” Now that you have been a VP candidate for over six weeks, do you know any better?

Sarah Palin: Well, if I am so blessed, and Senator McCain is so blessed… I expect that he has a role in mind, which will fulfill the maverick image that he and I have earned as two mavericks. We will reform Washington as two outsiders on a mission to…

Jack: But, Sarah. Excuse me; can I call you, Sarah? You see I have this joke, I mean, this question lined up later on that requires me to call you Sarah. So is that OK, Sarah?

Sarah Palin: Whatever, Jack? Your interview is not going to make it into the mainstream media, anyway, so you can call me whatever your puny readership desires…

Jack: Thanks, Sarah! But you just called Senator McCain an outsider when he has been a beltway insider for, like 26 years… what’s up with that?

Sarah Palin: Jack, Jack, Jack… Senator McCain has always been an outsider to members of his own party. In fact, he was going to pick that matzo ball, Lieberman, as his VP. Oops, silly me, cross that matzo ball thingy as off the record. Never mind, no one is going to read you, anyway… so, you see McCain has always been on the inside looking out!

Jack: But that still makes him an insider, so how is he going to reform anything?

Sarah Palin: Because he is going to bring all these outsiders and mavericks into Washington and reform the place. The man’s a maverick just like me…

Jack: OK, moving on… at a recent campaign rally, you said of Joe Biden, “I've been hearing about his Senate speeches since I was in, like, the second grade.” Sarah, Joe Biden entered the Senate in January 1973, when you were almost nine years old. At nine, most kids are in fourth grade, so did you like repeat…

Sarah Palin: Jack, I was joking… but seriously, what have you heard?

Jack: That you went to six different colleges before you graduated from your “own private Idaho?”

Sarah Palin: Ha! Ha! Very funny, Jack! What else you got?

Jack: Have?

Sarah Palin: What?

Jack: What else do you have?

Sarah Palin: Whatever…

Jack: Your older sister, Heather Bruce, told Glamour magazine recently that “What’s happening to Sarah Palin right now is like the worst college exam cram period ever.” Do you believe this is a fair way – essentially pulling a few all-nighters – to land a heartbeat away from the presidency?

Sarah Palin: Hey if Dubya got by for eight years, so can I. Besides, it can only get better, right? (At this point in my interview, Sarah concludes her answer by winking her left eye at me).

Jack: Are you trying to seduce me, Ms. Robinson?

Sarah Palin: Say what?

Jack: You just winked at me, so I remembered that famous line from “The Graduate?”

Sarah Palin: That movie was, like, so before my time…

Jack: Never mind. Let’s move on. In a recent campaign appearance you said that Senator Obama is “palling around with terrorists.” Don’t you think that was beyond the pale?

Sarah Palin: In what respect, Charlie?

Jack: I’m Jack…

Sarah Palin: Sorry, I had a flashback to Charlie Gibson for a moment there … Hmm… beyond the pale… Jack, are you making fun of my last name? Todd is standing right outside… he does not like people who make fun…

Jack: Sarah, ‘beyond the pale’ means over the top…

Sarah Palin: Then why didn’t you just say so, like we do in small-town America? Did you go to one of those fancy Ivy League schools like Obama?

Jack: Do you think it’s fair to associate Obama with a guy who was a terrorist forty years ago, when Obama was only eight?

Sarah Palin: Yes, because the guy helped launch Obama’s political career more recently back in the mid-90s.

Jack: So that is the same as “pallin” around? Sarah, your husband was a registered member of the Alaska Independence Party from the mid-90s until 2002. Isn’t your husband’s recent association with a secessionist party more egregious than Obama serving as one of the members of an education board, which happened to include a long rehabilitated ex-terrorist?

Sarah Palin: What’s your point, Jack? The people of Alaska still voted for me as their Governor.

Jack: Hey, maybe they all want to hook up with Russia! Who knows? Fifteen years from now I could say that I was “pallin” around with you just because of this one fake interview?

Sarah Palin: Hey, I am not looking beyond this election right now. Fifteen years is a long time in politics. What else you got?

Jack: Is it true that you told Bill Kristol that you wanted Senator McCain to take the gloves off?

Sarah Palin: Sure. He needs to bring up that Wright stuff, too!

Jack: I don’t think you want to go there, given that you are all over YouTube getting exorcised by a witch doctor from Africa?

Sarah Palin: Oh well, that pastor was getting rid of my demons, not demonizing my country!

Jack: What demons?

Sarah Palin: That’s personal, Jack.

Jack: OK. I would like you to answer this last question without using any one of the following words: bridge, maverick, reform, surge, victory, and exceptional. OK, why do you think Senator McCain will make a better president than Senator Obama?

Sarah Palin: Umm… because he always puts his country first!

Jack: But, you heard Obama say at his convention speech, “We all put our country first..."

Sarah Palin: I’d love to debate you, Jack, but that was your last question. Hey, Todd, can you show Jack out the door and send in the next wannabe… and get me an aspirin…

Jack: Thank you, Sara… When you build your house, call me home…

Sarah Palin: What? Todd, this guy is weird…

Todd Palin: That’s Fleetwood Mac, honey…

Jack: Don't stop (thinking about tomorrow)…

Folks, she could actually turn out to be our next Vice President! And you thought it couldn’t get any scarier after Cheney!

The Real McCoy

2008-09-11T11:15:00.008-04:00

The Internet has become the great equalizer, in that; it has empowered so many people in so many professions in so many ways. Google has given new meaning to the saying, “You can run, but you can’t hide.” YouTube has redefined what we mean by “A picture is worth a thousand words.” Bloggers have neutralized the news cycle by publishing “All the News That's Fit to Print” on a 24/7 basis.

And yet, there is not a Google search item, not one YouTube video, and nary a blog post that brings out the real Senator McCain. So I have decided to publish this satirical take on my alleged tête-à-tête with the Senator. Here’s how I think my faux conversation would expose the real McCoy:

Jack: Senator, let’s cut to the chase… have you heard of the saying “The more things change, the more they remain the same?”

McCain: Yes, but are you trying to suggest something…

Jack: Nothing. How long have you been in Washington?

McCain: I have been in Congress since 1983… I began as a foot-soldier in the Reagan Revolution…

Jack: Yeah, it’s quite amazing how you went from being a well-decorated, retired Navy captain to start out all over again as an ordinary foot-soldier in Congress.

McCain: I have paid my dues, my friend.

Jack: O.K., but many presidential candidates have promised to change Washington in the past 25 years, so how are you any different?

McCain: The others let Washington change ’em. Washington won’t change me. I am the same guy I was 25 years ago. I am set in my ways.

Jack: So you haven’t changed, but you will change Washington?

McCain: Damn straight!

Jack: How do you propose to do that?

McCain: I will veto every earmark that comes across my desk.

Jack: You realize that you will be likely working with a strong Democratic majority in both branches of Congress?

McCain: Yes, but I am determined to approve only pork-free bills.

Jack: Wow! Are you trying to appease the Muslims…

McCain: Very funny, Jack! Everyone’s a comedian…

Jack: But seriously, the last president to veto too many bills lasted only one term – your predecessor’s father – remember, “Read my lips…”

McCain: Of course, but he lost because he raised taxes, not because he vetoed bills!

Jack: Clinton raised taxes and vetoed bills – and still served two terms that saw unprecedented peace and prosperity?

McCain: That is because Clinton had a Republican Congress…

Jack: Reagan worked with a largely Democratic Congress…

McCain: Yeah, but they gave him what he wanted…

Jack: I would imagine that the GOP Congress gave Clinton what he wanted…

McCain: Look Jack, what’s your point?

Jack: You can’t bring about change by veto, especially with a Congress run by the other party.

McCain: My friend, I know how the system works, and I intend to change it. Period.

Jack: O.K. So you are going to change the meaning of “change?”

McCain: Exactly! Wait a minute – is that a trick question? Look, my friend, the Democrats are big spenders and they will insist on all their pork-barrel projects. Hillary with her healthcare plan – no amount of lipstick on that pig will get me to ever agree…

Jack: Excuse me, did you just call Hillary a pig?

McCain: Of course not! I was talking about her healthcare plan…

Jack: Just like Obama was talking about all your plans the other day…

McCain: No, no he was talking about Sarah – we even made an ad about it, so that the American people would know him for the Muslim that he is. You do know that Muslims consider pigs unholy and dirty, right? Why else, would he call Sarah a pig?

Jack: That is absolutely not true – are you trying to Swift boat the poor guy?

McCain: That is the only way we are going to win, my friend! I tried the “experience” thing first , then usurped the “change” mantle from Obama even though I don’t believe in it for a second. Heck, I have been a part of this old boy network for 25 years – why would I want to change anything now, when I am 72 years old. Hey, Obama threw us a freebie with this pig line – we are going to ride that baby to victory in November! All’s fair in love and politics!

Jack: Thank you, Senator McCain for the straight talk – you are the real McCoy!

P.S. In the interest of fairness and full disclosure, I am guilty of using the self-same term, “lipstick on a pig,” as can be evidenced by my letter to the Wall Street Journal dated October 15, 2007.

Avoiding Déjà vu All Over Again In U.S. Foreign Policy

2007-12-23T17:33:00.000-05:00

(This article was written during the Thanksgiving weekend, but is only being published now. General Musharraf is now "President" Musharraf - but given the circumstances of his transformation, these titles have no meaningful distinction, so I reproduce my original article as is.)

Since its creation sixty years ago, Pakistan has alternated between democracy and military rule every decade or so. So how many times are we going to watch a rerun of the same old movie, in which the U.S. government chooses to support a military dictatorship in Pakistan with money and arms rather than help its people sustain a liberal democracy? And, we choose to do this because it happens to serve our short-term interests better than it does their long-term future? While Pakistan has always been an invaluable ally in the conduct of U.S. foreign policy from the Kirkpatrick Doctrine of the 1980s to the Bush Doctrine of the 2000s, it invariably ends up as a discarded by-product when these doctrines have run their course.

President Bush must surely make a poor poker player. In June 2001, he misread the "honesty" of Russia's Putin by looking into his eyes to get a sense of his soul, which then subsequently proved to be non-existent. After 9/11 he similarly bought into the "sincerity" of Pakistan's Musharraf, who has also betrayed him by his recent actions. General Musharraf has turned out to be a run-of-the-mill dictator that Pakistan routinely produces every decade or so. Musharraf has repeatedly spoken the anti-terrorism language that Bush likes to hear, while acting consistently in an anti-democratic manner during his illegal reign. In this post-9/11 decade, the Bush Administration has spent almost $10 billion to-date on General Musharraf in the vain hopes that he would actually help us win the "war on terror" against an Al Qaeda-Taliban axis that permeates a significant yet nebulous cross-section of Afghani-Pakistani society.

Meanwhile the Bush Administration has more or less ignored the Pakistani people's ever increasing demands for a more meaningful democracy. Hollywood will soon release "Charlie Wilson's War," a movie which depicts how the U.S. coddled another Pakistani military dictator back in the 1980s – in order to get his support in throwing the Soviets out of Afghanistan. Ironically, after Pakistan had helped the U.S. achieve that important goal in 1989, the elder President Bush rewarded them by withholding deliveries of F-16 fighter jets as necessitated by the 1990 Pressler Amendment. Despite the Pressler sanctions, in 1998 Pakistan defiantly carried out its first nuclear test, which forced President Clinton to impose sanctions on a fragile nation in the waning phase of its democratic decade.

In the post-Soviet 1990s, Pakistan also helped an idling Afghan mujaheddin coalesce into the Taliban, which then usurped power in Afghanistan. The Taliban ruled Afghanistan up until 9/11 with an extremist ideology that included succor for Al Qaeda with the tacit support of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) branch of Pakistan's Army. Following 9/11, President Bush struck a Faustian bargain with Pakistan's relatively new military dictator, General Musharraf. In return for cash, arms, and the support of the U.S. government, President Bush sought Musharraf's assistance in crushing the very same Taliban, which Pakistan's military had previously helped create and flourish! Why the Bush Administration ever deemed this to be a winning proposition boggles the mind?

One of our founding fathers, Benjamin Franklin, had defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. So when is the U.S. foreign policy establishment going to realize that we need to pursue lasting relationships based on our core values and that we should not repeatedly experiment with unprincipled dalliances of convenience? If U.S. foreign policy continues to placate WMD-possessing military dictators, such as Pakistan's Musharraf and North Korea's Kim Jong Il, while sanctioning or attacking WMD-seeking despots, such as Iran's Ahmedinejad and Iraq's now-deceased Saddam Hussein, then we are only going to hasten the WMD acquisition process amongst so-called rogue nations. More importantly, such a dubious policy makes the U.S. lose credibility in the eyes of the world. Especially in the case of Pakistan, which – despite selling its nuclear technology to rogue nations such as Iran, Libya and North Korea – was seen by the world as getting a free pass from the Bush Administration?

Senator Biden was absolutely right when he suggested that the Bush Administration had a tunnel-vision "Musharraf policy" as opposed to a broad-based "Pakistan policy." It is highly likely that if General Musharraf really starts to feel pressured, he will direct his ISI to instigate suicide bombings – not in the Afghan border region, but near the line of control that demarcates India and Pakistan in Kashmir. The Pakistani military has always had this time-tested way to quickly unite Pakistanis and rev up patriotic fervor – by accusing neighboring India of "exploiting" a volatile situation in Pakistan. In fact, General Musharraf could even have his Army engage in a few border skirmishes with India to distract Pakistani attention from his domestic troubles – this too has been done before.

Nonetheless, the U.S. can no longer afford to maintain a double standard in its dealings with Pakistan – seeking to ensure the stability of this nuclear-armed dictatorship in the short-term at the expense of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for its people in the long term – because this will eventually turn out to be a losing proposition for both sides. Sadly, our 1980s paradigm will not help resolve the current crisis in Pakistan. At least back then, Pakistan's military dictator, General Zia, was actually helping us fight a common enemy (the Soviets). This time around, General Musharraf has suppressed the very symbols of Pakistani democracy – judges, lawyers, the media and opposition leaders – while the bad guys (Al Qaeda-Taliban) continue to openly and freely consolidate their strength.

However, it is not too late to refocus U.S. policy in Pakistan towards freedom and democracy – especially since promoting these core American values were the stated objectives of the Bush second term. Such a policy change is all the more imperative because it is the moderate and literate elements of Pakistani society that are clamoring for democracy and the rule of law. The great Pakistani paradox, which demands the reconciling of a functioning liberal democracy with the seemingly conflicting demands of an orthodox Muslim theology, can only be resolved by the duly elected moderate factions in its society. Pakistan could yet become a shining example of a Muslim democracy, provided its military stops intervening every time it foresees or fakes a "crisis." We would much rather have a nuclear-armed Pakistan run by prudent civilians than by an unpredictable army or some of its more extremist elements. This is the only way we can hope to bring real stability to that critical part of the world.

Thus President Bush should refrain from aiding Pakistan's collapse by sending any more ambiguous messages to General Musharraf. He might recall how a similar lack of clarity on the elder Bush’s part prompted Saddam Hussein to invade Kuwait in 1990 – the long term repercussions of which President Bush is still dealing with today. In two of the past three decades, military dictators have happened to rule Pakistan when acquiescing Republican presidents have occupied the White House. General Zia received as much support from the Reagan Administration in the 1980s as General Musharraf has from the Bush Administration in the 2000s.

Yet Musharraf must already be looking beyond the Bush presidency. He probably recognizes that if a Democratic Administration takes over from Bush, it will be less tolerant of the status quo in Pakistan. So General Musharraf will try to continue to consolidate his hold on power over the next fourteen months. And, he is doing so by adopting a classic line from the Bush playbook – claiming that he is "temporarily" trading liberty for security in Pakistan's ongoing assistance with Bush’s "war on terror" – which seems to be receiving sympathetic consideration from the Bush Administration.

In a November 2003 address at the 20th Anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy, President Bush had proclaimed, "Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe — because in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty. As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment, and violence ready for export. And with the spread of weapons that can bring catastrophic harm to our country and to our friends, it would be reckless to accept the status quo."

President Bush must surely realize that as long as our foreign policy continues to accommodate friendly dictators in allied Muslim nations such as Egypt, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, we are not going to make any real progress in the larger war on terrorism. If the president can't "walk his own talk" and continues to accept the status quo in Pakistan, how can he expect General Musharraf to behave any differently? If Musharraf is willing to pack his nation's Supreme Court with stooges and amend its constitution so that he can never be held accountable for his actions, he might as well appoint himself president for life and be done with it.

It is long past time for an American president to realize that the only way to avoid experiencing déjà vu all over again with our foreign policy is to let consistency in our principles trump the convenience of our causes, when these two ideals are in conflict. Also, in order to change hearts and minds in the Muslim world, we need to practice a less duplicitous foreign policy with our key Islamic allies. Only by refocusing our foreign policy on core American values, can we expect to make progress in Pakistan and the Muslim world. In fact, only by returning to a foreign policy that is solidly based on our cherished principles, can we regain the respect of the larger fraternity of nations? With the Annapolis summit in mind, now might be a good time for President Bush to send such an unequivocal message to the Arab world.

Don’t Misunderestimate the Strategery – It’s Stay the Course!

2007-09-16T22:49:00.001-04:00

Our first MBA president has taken the Drucker principle of management by objectives and turned it on its head. President Bush has instead managed by strategy and manipulated the objectives to fit the strategy. This has clearly been the case with his Iraq policy, where the president has used a very nebulous and ill-defined strategy, which has been consistently referred to as “staying the course.” And yet, the objectives in Iraq have been frequently manipulated – from finding WMD, then establishing democracy, to defeating the insurgency, etc. – all to fit the same adamant “stay the course” strategy.

In the first year of the war, the objective was pretty much to find Iraq’s WMD and President Bush was determined to “stay the course” until they were found. Following David Kay’s shocking “I don’t think they existed” revelation in January 2004 about Iraq’s WMD, and the Iraq Survey Group’s subsequent confirmation of the same, President Bush changed his objective for Iraq. Following his own reelection, and with Iraqis then voting in their first elections, President Bush’s objective for Iraq became,

“a free, representative government that is an ally in the war on terror, and a beacon of hope in a part of the world that is desperate for reform.”

Alas, his strategy to get there remained essentially to “stay the course.”

Even more unfortunately, a month before President Bush stated this new lofty goal for Iraq, Vice President Cheney had already predicated “staying the course” by dismissing a growing insurgency as being “in its last throes.” In early 2006 a critical Shiite mosque in Samara was torched and much of central Iraq was overwhelmed by violence. So the Bush Administration changed its objective in Iraq yet again. The objective was no longer to build a liberal democracy but to focus on defeating a raging insurgency. Regrettably, the strategy to get there was essentially a “clear, hold, and build” version of “stay the course,” in the sense that it relied on Iraq’s notoriously unreliable security forces to do the “hold and build” part.

Meanwhile “staying the course” in Iraq for almost four years without tangible results did not go down well with the American public. So they expressed their displeasure in the 2006 mid-term elections by voting the president’s party out of power from both chambers in Congress. Shortly after, the Iraq Study Group (ISG) issued its recommendations and endorsed President Bush’s new post-election strategic goal for an Iraq that could

“govern itself, sustain itself, and defend itself.”

However, President Bush chose not to implement the ISG’s methodology of getting there. Instead in January 2007, President Bush finally announced a new “surge” strategy to be executed under the auspices of General Petraeus.

The new “surge” strategy relied on 30,000 more American troops to “clear, hold, and build” in and around Baghdad so as to bring down the violence and thus give Iraqis a chance at political reconciliation. Fortunately, even before the “surge” started, it benefited from unexpected success in the western Iraqi province of Anbar, where the local population turned against Al Qaeda insurgents. But sadly, the political apparatus in Baghdad far from reconciling began to fall apart as Sunni and Shia leaders began to desert the Al-Maliki government at regular intervals throughout the spring and summer.

By its very definition, a surge is a temporary phenomenon and hence the gains that come with it can also be transitory. The pockets of peace that have been established in the tribal areas of Iraq should thus be celebrated with caution. These nomadic desert tribes have had a history of transient and shifting loyalties. Nonetheless, to maintain these gains on the periphery, a strong central uniting force is absolutely critical. If an Iraqi Prime Minister is incapable of holding the center, a lasting peace will never come to Baghdad, and Iraq will eventually break apart.

Prior to the much anticipated Petraeus Report to Congress on September 10th, a couple of other independent sources, such as the General Accounting Office (GAO) and the Jones Commission also released their findings on post-surge Iraq. The GAO found that

“Iraq has failed to meet 11 of the 18 military and political objectives, or benchmarks, set by Congress and agreed on by Mr. Bush,”

according to a New York Times report dated September 4th. A couple of days later, Retired Marine Gen. James Jones presented his commission’s conclusions to the Senate Armed Services Committee. Per a NPR report,

“while Gen. Jones noted that there have been what he called ‘tactical successes’ with the U.S. troop surge, he said that Iraq remains torn by sectarian strife.”

Then, on the sixth anniversary of 9/11, General Petraeus testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee with his take on the “surge.” This is how ABC News reported one telling exchange between Senator John Warner and General Petraeus:

“Are you able to say at this time if we continue what you’ve laid before the Congress here as a strategy do you feel that is making America safer?” Warner asked.

“Sir, I believe that this is indeed the best course of action to achieve our objectives in Iraq,” Petraeus said.

“Does that make America safer?” Warner asked again.

“Sir,” Petraeus said, “I don't know actually.”

For having put General Petraeus in a position where he had to give such an answer, President Bush ought to feel ashamed. President Bush could not very well have made such a candid assessment himself, so he chose to hide behind General Petraeus. It is an even bigger shame that President Bush is thus politicizing our military by using its officers to effectively prolong his failed Iraq policy.

Following the 2006 mid-term elections and the subsequent Iraq Study Group report, President Bush made a gullible American public believe that his “surge” strategy would be different and its primary purpose would be to meet political objectives in Iraq. The “surge” has more or less given us the same old, same old. Nonetheless, President Bush and his die-hard supporters are intent on moving “forward to the past,” which is basically the same as “staying the course.” While the rest of us want to go “back to the future,” in which we could finally “give peace a chance.”

In an ironic case of real life imitating art, it is as if President Bush has all along been pleading with us not to “misunderestimate the strategery.” But seriously, how long can he muddle along in Iraq without further weakening our overstretched Army and Marines? How many more times are we going to hear that “the next six months are critical?” With no exit strategy in sight, when President Bush finally leaves office in January 2009, he is on track to leave behind not only a stalemate in Iraq, but also a broken military – that would be some legacy, indeed!

After Summer Surge, Comes Fall Purge?

2007-09-02T23:01:00.000-04:00

Labor Day, which marks the official end of summer, is upon us. Let us hope that this year it marks an end to our discontent with the intense heat both, meteorologically and metaphorically. It was sad to see the President and Congress, who profess to “support our troops” at every opportunity they get, beat a hasty retreat from the hot August nights of Washington, D.C. Before they “got outta Dodge,” they could have at least afforded the same luxury to a few of our valiant troops, who continued to sizzle in the 130 degree heat of Baghdad.

In his July 20, 2007 column, the conservative chameleon Charles Krauthammer decided that after waiting 18 months “for the 80 percent solution,” he now feels comfortable switching sides to “the 20 percent solution.” This happens to be the same 20 percent of the population that ruled under Saddam Hussein’s Iraq – against whom President Bush launched this war, toppled its government, and then proceeded to quickly de-Baathify (akin to de-Sunnify) its new power structure.

Mr. Krauthammer speculated that

“Maliki & Co. are afraid we are arming Sunnis for the civil war to come. On the other hand, we might be creating a rough balance of forces that would act as a deterrent to all-out civil war and encourage a relatively peaceful accommodation. In either case, that will be Iraq’s problem after we leave.”

It is precisely this kind of arrogance and disdain that the Bush Administration has shown in its conduct of the Iraq war and its larger Middle East policy that aggravates and insults Muslim throughout the world. Mr. Krauthammer should have realized by now that his “purely American vision” is unlikely to solve the problem in Iraq and the larger Middle East.

So while he has been cooling off in Kennebunkport this August, President Bush hopefully reflected more deeply on the significance of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s recent visit with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Tehran. The two beaming leaders clutched hands, just like President Bush and King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia did in Crawford, Texas back in April 2005. This renewed embrace by the two Shiite leaders of Iran and Iraq was a direct consequence of the Petraeus plan that unfolded in the Anbar province of western Iraq over the summer. It is no coincidence that the Maliki government was simultaneously deserted by Sunni leaders in the Iraqi Parliament just as the larger Sunni population began making its peace with U.S. forces west of Baghdad.

The current Shiite government in Iraq, which the Bush Administration helped elect and install, must have had a sense of déjà vu with the resurgence of Sunni power that was being aided by freshly supplied U.S. arms. How long then, it must have wondered, before a Saddam wannabe threatens to topple a duly-elected Shiite government by force? How long before the whole world is back to square one in Iraq?

So both, Democrats and Republicans might just want to reconsider the notion that the main problem in Iraq lies with Mr. Maliki. In order to get the surge to work in Baghdad, General Petraeus struck a deal with Sunni insurgents in Iraq’s western Anbar province. This peace has come at a big price – it not only drove Shiite Prime Minister Maliki into the arms of his Iranian sponsor Ahmedinejad in Tehran, but also got him to embrace Syrian strongman Bashir in Damascus. Rearmed Sunnis must surely have rekindled flashbacks of the Saddam era in the Shia leader’s mind.

Nonetheless, Maliki might just be smarter than we imagine – he could already be making plans for an Iraq after the U.S. leaves. Prime Minister Maliki might just pull of an early “October surprise” for the United States a full year before our own presidential elections – by calling for a phased withdrawal of American troops before President Bush has even had time to digest the Petraeus report. I suspect that Bush’s recent indictment of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and his subsequent Vietnam analogy could have been directed more at Maliki than at the American public?

The Bush Administration has always insisted that “we fight them over there, so that we don't have to fight them over here.” General Petraeus, in lock step with this viewpoint, recently told Rep. Jan Schakowsky that U.S. forces could be in Iraq for the next nine to ten years. Well, pulling out of Iraq might just turn that argument on its head. All manner of pundits have been predicting an all-out civil war in Iraq if we prematurely withdraw. However, there is more likely to be prolonged internecine warfare in the larger Middle East amongst the various Muslim factions – Sunni, Shia, Kurds, Hezbollah, Hamas, Al-Qaeda, etc – across multiple borders and involving at the very least Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, and the Palestine territories.

While these angry followers of Islam are thus engaged in sorting out their problems, the rest of the western world could be at peace, albeit, an expensive one. We might be forced to pay ten dollars a gallon for gas while it lasts, but in the long run that could well be well worth the price for peace and security in the homeland. More importantly, our overall price tag could be far less than the $500 billion that we have already spent on the Iraq war. Also, at $10 per gallon of gas, I am confident that American ingenuity would quickly develop alternative fuel sources that could rid us of what President Bush referred to as our “addiction to oil.”

The Pakistani Paradox

2007-08-22T22:11:00.000-04:00

There was a disconcerting common thread in Moshin Hamid's rather reluctant celebration of Pakistan's 60th birthday on the editorial pages of the August 15th New York Times. It turns out that Pakistan has been “a steadfast American ally” whenever it happened to be under military rule as was true with Gen. Mohammad Ayub Khan in the 1960s, Gen. Muhammad Zia ul-Haq in the 1980s, and Gen. Pervez Musharraf in the 2000s. Ironically, General Musharraf was also quite the American media darling when he was peddling his book last year – even making a coveted appearance on Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show.” However, given all the recent negative press, it has become rather apparent that the General has long since fallen out of favor.

As the reluctant fundamentalist’s article implies, and those of us who grew up in the Indian subcontinent are keenly aware, military dictators have never ever been as good for Pakistan as they have been for the United States. In keeping with this tradition, General Musharraf has had his illicit turn but now his time is up. The purported power-sharing agreement that he has been trying to finalize with ex-Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto would be bad for both Pakistan and the United States – ipso facto, the idea having emanated out of the Bush Administration, it would surely be unpalatable to the larger Pakistani population.

Since 9/11 General Musharraf has been consistently accused of having it both ways in trying to balance his covert support for the Taliban versus his overt allegiance to the Bush Administration in hunting down Al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan. One could infer that President Bush has also been trying to play it both ways with Pakistan, given his bold pronouncement following 9/11 to be resolute against “any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism.” Despite knowing for a long time now that “Taliban and Qaeda fighters continue to find shelter and support on Pakistan’s side of the Afghan border,” President Bush has not acted decisively against them. The New York Times reported recently that the Bush Administration scrubbed “a 2005 American attempt to capture Qaeda leaders on Pakistani soil.”

Pakistan is and has always been the “Rodney Dangerfield” of nations – unable to command any respect. In fact, General Musharraf's confession to 60 Minutes correspondent Steve Kroft during his book promotion interview last September confirms this viewpoint. Per the General’s own account, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, then-Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage made a very blunt threat to Pakistan’s Director of Intelligence:

“Be prepared to be bombed. Be prepared to go back to the Stone Age.”

Herein lies the Pakistani paradox, which appears to be a dilemma that actually confronts most Muslim nations – how to reconcile the requirements for a functioning liberal democracy against the seemingly conflicting demands of an orthodox Muslim theology? Democracy did not seem to be the perfect solution for India in 1947, but both democracy and a secular India have managed to survive and prosper through some tumultuous times. Pakistan could yet become a shining example of a Muslim democracy, provided its military stops stepping in every time it foresees or fakes a “crisis.” And, more importantly, the next time a military officer dares to overthrow an elected government in Pakistan, the United States should use whatever means necessary to force him back into his barracks.

A ‘New Clear’ Passage to India

2007-08-11T17:44:00.000-04:00

The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) came into force in 1970 after China’s first nuclear test in 1964 and before India’s first nuclear explosion ten years later. At that time, the NPT recognized as “nuclear weapon states,” only those nations that had conducted nuclear tests prior to 1967. These nations happened to be the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council. Although the People’s Republic of China did not take its legitimate place as a UN member until 1971 and then signed the NPT only in 1992.

A recent New York Times editorial lamented that “When it comes to nuclear proliferation, Washington's only real policy is to reward its friends and punish its enemies.” Even if there were something wrong with this typically conservative principle, it should be noted that U.S. foreign policy had made some rather hefty concessions back in the early seventies to accommodate communist China. This was part of President Nixon’s “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” overture to engage one communist giant while trying to contain the other – the Soviet Union.

These progressive considerations of yesteryear have brought us to the current situation, in which China is now viewed by our foreign policy establishment as a long-term strategic threat to the United States. We find ourselves in this predicament, in large part, because our policy of engagement has helped steer China towards a market economy without bringing about commensurate change in its political system and authoritarian form of government.

The afore-mentioned Times editorial also stated that

“President Bush is understandably desperate for some kind of foreign policy success”

and thereby implying that his India strategy could actually chalk one up for him in the win column. It is quite likely that Bush’s forward-thinking nuclear deal with India might do just that. This is one instance where the neocons in the Bush Administration are actually seeing the forest for the trees by laying the foundation for a seminal paradigm shift in 21st century U.S. foreign policy – one that not only addresses our China syndrome, but also considers the larger threat as defined by the ongoing “global war on terror.”

So then why is Wall Street Journal columnist, Bret Stephens, not a happy camper? In a recent column he accused our “new clear” partner of keeping “bad company” with Iran. Mr. Stephens’ probably needs a refresher course on our own recent haphazard dealings with Iran. After 9/11, a “coalition -- made up of Iran, India, Russia and the Northern Alliance, and aided by massive American airpower -- drove the Taliban from power.” Despite this measure of Persian support, barely a couple of months later in his 2002 State of the Union speech, President Bush went on to declare Iran as a charter member of his “axis of evil.” Then, to further confound matters, he placed an unseemly reliance on dubious information from known Iranian-sympathizer, Ahmed Chalabi, and invaded Iraq in March 2003.

If that weren’t bewildering enough, since 2005 President Bush has relied heavily on the Iranian-backed government of Iraqi Prime Minister Al-Maliki to “sustain, govern and defend itself.” But now, with the weight of the impending Petraeus Report hanging over its head, the Bush Administration figures that Shiite Iran’s influence in the Middle East is getting out of control. So the Administration wants to hedge its bets on Iraq and re-supply our traditional Sunni allies, Saudi Arabia and its satellite Gulf States, over $20 billion in an arms deal. This is the same Saudi Arabia that – accounted for fifteen of nineteen hijackers on the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and – gave birth to Osama Bin Laden and the Bush Administration’s original “war on terror.” Is it any wonder then, why they – the Muslim nations – continue to hate us?

If Mr. Stephens could see the forest for the trees, he might have realized that going forward India could actually help us with our tenuous relationship with Iran. More importantly, these two nations could also help us snare our $50 million man, who has enjoyed a safe haven within the borders of another shaky Sunni ally, Pakistan, since his escape from the Tora Bora mountains in late 2001 . From a long term strategic standpoint, just as we look to India as a counter-weight to China in Asia, it is within our national security interests to have a Shia power counter-balance the traditional Sunni hegemony in the Middle East.

From a more practical standpoint, our “new clear” passage to India could mutually benefit not only our two great democracies, but also it could become the basis for new, long-term alliances throughout the western world. My reasoning is based on an observation that I had first made in my 2005 book, “The Bush Diaries,” and is worth repeating:

“The population of the world can be divided into roughly four equal quadrants — Judeo-Christian, Hindu-Buddhist, Muslim, and Communist. A vast majority of the people that constitute the Judeo-Christian and Hindu-Buddhist quadrants happen to live in secular democracies. It would therefore seem natural for these quadrants to be more closely aligned, since they share similar economic and political value systems? One would hope that an alignment of this nature could become an ideal for peace and prosperity throughout the world.”

Gap could sue U.S. for infringement of "Banana Republic" brand

2007-07-08T16:12:00.000-04:00

I don’t even need to go into the Bush Administration’s first term transgressions, about which I have published an entire book called “The Bush Diaries.” Here are five revelations, from just the past few months, as to why the Gap, Inc. could sue the United States for infringing on its “Banana Republic” brand:

1. Week of July 2, 2007 – from various news reports: While commuting I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby’s sentence on July 2nd President Bush said, “I respect the jury's verdict. But I have concluded that the prison sentence given to Mr. Libby is excessive.” However, the very next day, President Bush refused to rule out a full pardon for Libby saying, “As to the future, I rule nothing in and nothing out.” Meanwhile, in an American Research Group poll, 64% of Americans voiced their disapproval of President Bush’s decision.

2. Jun 29, 2007 report by the Associated Press: “An assistant attorney general at the Justice Department announced her resignation on Friday, becoming the seventh official to quit the department since the Democratic-led Congress launched an investigation in March into the firing of nine federal prosecutors.” This exodus comes on the heels of Attorney General Gonzales’ April 19 testimony to Congress during which he suffered a bout of amnesia uttering variations of “I do not recall” over 70 times.

3. June 24, 2007 report in the Washington Post: Barton Gellman and Jo Becker’s four-part series “The Angler” provided sufficient evidence of a loose chameleon running amok in the White House. The Post reporters claimed that Vice President Cheney’s general counsel had asserted that “the vice presidency is a unique office that is neither a part of the executive branch nor a part of the legislative branch.”

4. May 16, 2007 report in the Washington Post: In March 2004 White House Consiglierie Alberto “Fredo” Gonzales made a midnight run on the intensive care unit of George Washington University Hospital. Fredo and White House chief of staff Andrew Card raced to ailing Attorney General John Ashcroft’s bedside in the ICU to force him to reauthorize President Bush's warrantless wiretapping program of U.S. citizens.

5. April 30, 2006 report in the Boston Globe: “President Bush has quietly claimed the authority to disobey more than 750 laws enacted since he took office, asserting that he has the power to set aside any statute passed by Congress when it conflicts with his interpretation of the Constitution.”

This sorry record reminds me of a joke that I had heard on TV from the Democratic Party pundit, Paul Begala. In the heat of the post-2000 election fiasco, Mr. Begala had wise-cracked,

“We are not a banana republic. We only have banana Republicans.”

At that time, he had it only half-right. Given the way the Bush Administration has governed since, the Gap could easily win its brand infringement case in a court of law, albeit, in a foreign one! The U.S. courts would probably need to recuse themselves due to a conflict of interest!

The 21st Century China Syndrome

2007-05-19T20:09:00.000-04:00

Prior to 9/11 China was high on the Bush Administration’s priorities, but Iraq has pretty much consumed the Bush presidency since then. Here’s what BBC News reported on the eve of Secretary Powell’s first visit to Beijing in July 2001:

Almost immediately he arrived in the White House President Bush began talking tough on China. President Clinton liked to refer to China as a strategic ‘partner’. President Bush changed that to strategic ‘competitor’.

In the six years of the Bush presidency, the U.S. trade deficit with China has ballooned 180% from $83 billion in 2001 to $233 billion in 2006 per the Foreign Trade Statistics of the U.S. Census Bureau.

In January 2007, the Associated Press reported that

“China's foreign exchange reserves, already the world's largest, have passed US$1 trillion,”

and

“economists believe about 70 percent is in U.S. Treasuries.”

Given these statistics it would seem on the surface that the Bush Administration has only managed to further solidify China’s role as a “strategic partner” to the United States. In fact, with the U.S. economy now so heavily dependent on China, President Bush – in the little time that he has left in his term – and future U.S. presidents are going to find it increasingly difficult to change the status quo with China without a paradigm shift in our China policy.

So I was not at all surprised when George Will expressed his very own skepticism in a recent column, “Real Change In China?” using James Mann’s book, “The China Fantasy: How Our Leaders Explain Away Chinese Repression,” as a reference. However, it is important for Americans to realize that Mr. Will's “regime change” sought by President Nixon’s policy of engagement with China has still to bear fruit after 35 years. By comparison our policy of containment of the Soviet Union and communism, initiated by President Truman after World War II, achieved its objective in 45 years.

Coincidentally, containment was also beginning to languish as an ineffective doctrine around its 35th anniversary until President Reagan took office in 1981. He then jump-started it with his “evil empire” offensive and the Soviet Union collapsed barely a decade later.

As mentioned earlier, President Bush has been overwhelmed by the “global war on terror” that he initiated under the auspices of his very own “Bush Doctrine.” Unfortunately, the magnitude and complexity of conducting this preemption policy has rendered him incapable of seriously revisiting our China engagement policy – which happens to be languishing, like its Soviet containment cousin did, in its 35th anniversary.

Meanwhile, as the U.S. economy continues to get more and more interminably entwined and dependent on China, cold turkey disengagement is hardly a viable option and “real change in China” slips further into oblivion. No matter how China performs in the 2008 Beijing Olympics, it long ago won the gold medal for international statecraft.

Alas, we have already begun to witness the 21st century China Syndrome – in which China has already demonstrated its ability to launch a missile and destroy an orbiting satellite, to make and launch a satellite for Nigeria, and has also publicly announced its intention to land on the moon by 2010.

Thus, the strategic imperative for the United States is no longer in doubt – China has already morphed into a “worrisome competitor” – we must therefore redefine and pursue a more holistic relationship with this budding superpower, one that encompasses economic, foreign, and trade policies that are not only in sync with our core values, but also more cognizant of the 21st century China Syndrome.

Mayday Mission Deconstructed – GWOT morphs into the “GWOB”

2007-04-30T16:05:00.000-04:00

In a bitter irony, the Democratic Congress will present President Bush a new war funding bill – which he has promised to veto – on the fourth anniversary of his infamous “Mission Accomplished” speech of May 1, 2003. Meanwhile the American public is screaming, “Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!” because President Bush is surging troops four years after he had declared “Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.”

After tolerating four years of incompetence, the American people had clearly expressed their desire in the 2006 mid-term elections – to change the status quo ante in Iraq. Nevertheless, President Bush persists with a military “surge” strategy that defies the will of a majority of the people. Tragically, the Associated Press reported today that “U.S. Military Deaths Toll Rises Above 100 for Month, Making April Deadliest of 2007 So Far” and it also confirmed that April “has been the deadliest month for British forces in Iraq since the first month of the war.” In a weird twist of fate, the United States has gone from being a purveyor of “shock and awe” to becoming its hapless witness – as is evidenced in the ever-increasing carnage wrought by Iraq’s warring sectarian factions.

It thus seemed even more ironical that on the same day that we learned about the death of former Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, we also read about the American military building the equivalent of the “Great Wall of Baghdad (GWOB).” One might recall the big bear from Moscow climbing atop a tank to defend Russia’s fledgling democracy in 1991– an action that came to symbolize the tipping point in the dismantling of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Exactly twenty months and ten days after the Berlin Wall fell, the great wall of totalitarianism surrounding the “evil empire” had also been irrevocably ruptured.

Given the significance of walls in political history, it was rather distressing to find out that the world’s greatest democracy had sanctioned the erection of the GWOB in the darkest traditions of Berlin and Belfast. Could the U.S. have emulated a worse symbol of authoritarian occupation in Iraq than through a Soviet-style balkanization of the Iraqi people? The Global War on Terror (GWOT) has just morphed into what could become its defining symbol – the GWOB. So much for bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East – yet another of the Bush Administration’s ever-changing Iraq objectives has been turned on its head.

Finally, with their reported attempts to appoint a war czar at home, it is apparent that the Bush Administration is no longer in a state of denial – they are clearly trying to finesse a war situation that is going from bad to worse. President Bush has surely seen the writing on the wall – but it is not the graffiti on the GWOB going up in Iraq. No, I suspect that he has finally foreseen the fate of his GWOT policy of preemption, a.k.a. the Bush Doctrine. No one should be surprised if there is a “Roving” hand behind this final preemptive strike – to appoint a fall guy to manage the chaos as “the gang that couldn’t shoot straight” heads for the exit on the greatest disaster in American foreign policy in history.

Foreign Policy Evolution – My Way to the High Way

2007-04-21T17:17:00.000-04:00

The recent kidnapping and release of British sailors by Iran should provide much needed foreign policy therapy to the western world. If the west is ever going to win the “global war on terror,” without preemptively calling it off, it needs to exhibit more backbone. It’s no surprise that these British sailors have been chastised for having “sung like canaries” after barely two weeks in captivity.

Instead of hearing “name, rank, and serial number,” the world saw these sailors acting chummy with their captors, “confessing” to their guilt, wearing enemy-supplied business suits, and pumping the Iranian president’s hand in deference. We have had real American civilian hostages, held for years in the eighties by Iranian-backed groups in Lebanon, who behaved with more dignity than these British “hostages.”

More importantly, their behavior is in stark contrast to the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, who have been held for over five years and subjected to some unquestionably rough treatment, but have yet to cough up the whereabouts of Osama Bin Laden or Ayman Al Zawahiri. So it has become quite apparent that the western world needs to shift gears in its fight in the war on terror – it needs to reacquire its “Cold War-style” mentality and rely on more human intelligence than raw firepower to win it. (This is the basis for a “Silent War” strategy – that I had advocated back in September 2002 – which is explained in my 2005 book, “The Bush Diaries.”)

In the interim, by its very definition, the conduct of the “global war on terror” needs to be subject to international scrutiny. While speaking before a House appropriations subcommittee about Guantanamo Bay prisoners recently, Defense Secretary Gates requested Congress “to address the concerns about some of these people who really need to be incarcerated forever, but that doesn’t get them involved in a judicial system where there is the potential of them being released, frankly.”

Secretary Gates’ statement was troubling in many ways:

1. It implied continued distrust in the U.S. judicial system, which the Bush Administration has repeatedly tried to circumvent in the handling of suspects related to the attacks of 9/11.
2. By suggesting that some of these people “need to be incarcerated forever,” Mr. Gates was prejudging the gravity of their guilt, which thus far has not been proven in a court of law.
3. Whatever happened to the basic tenet – innocent until proven guilty – of modern western law?
4. Asking Congress to legislate the equivalent of what former Judge John J. Gibbons has referred to as “law-free zones” within the United States sets a dangerous precedent – imagine American citizens being held in foreign countries that established their own “law-free zones?”

As horrific as the events of 9/11 were, the United States has since been viewed internationally as subverting the rule of law at Guantanamo Bay – akin to changing the rules in the middle of the ball game to ensure that it wins. If President Bush is serious about bringing democracy to the Middle East, he must realize that it is not a zero sum game – it does not have to be restricted at home to export it abroad. In clichéd terms – democracy, like happiness, is not a destination but a journey. How one gets there is as important as actually getting there? Noble ends do not justify ignoble means – habeas corpus rights ought to be universal and sacrosanct. Winning over the hearts and minds of those Middle East monarchies has become harder with the Bush Administration’s “do as I say, not as I do” approach to fundamental human rights.

Speaking of monarchies, Jim Hoagland wrote about “Bush’s Royal Trouble” recently in his Washington Post column and why King Abdullah had turned down one of those rare Bush White House state dinner invitations. In my judgment, this trouble is not as much of an indicator that “Saudis, too, know how to read election returns” in the United States, as it is their recognition of the new realpolitik in the Middle East. Apparently, Jordan's King Abdullah has also told the White House – guess who else is not coming to dinner? It is therefore pretty obvious that major foreign policy realignment is in the works amongst the Sunni nations of the Middle East.

It’s clear that the Sunni command structure has been threatened by the outcome of the Iraq war. In essence, they have seen an oil-rich, Sunni-ruled nation fall under the influence of Iran – a rising symbol of Shia power, which supports the likes of Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Palestinian territories. But they have also seen the growth of this Shia power emanating from their people via popular elections, whereas Sunni supremacy continues to be sustained through unpopular monarchies. The Sunni royals recognize that going forward Islam could be their great uniter, if not their savior – and thus, they must try to co-opt Iran before the West does.

However, co-opting Iran is anathema to the Bush Administration – they won’t even talk to Iran or, for that matter, Syria. Given the Sunni realignment taking place in the Middle East, one would imagine that the Bush Administration would engage these two neighbors of Iraq to ensure that its Iraq policy does not get burned at both – Sunni and Shia – ends of the stick. But then, charity begins at home – if the Bush Administration has a basic problem uniting domestic opposition to its war policies, how is it going to bring foreign opponents to the Iraq table?

This “my way or the highway” culture is inbred – most domestic opponents of President Bush’s “global war on terror” policies are constantly harangued by all manner of conservatives as being unpatriotic. It stems from their extension of Bush’s “you’re either with us or against us” philosophy to ordinary American citizens who have a different viewpoint. Again, had the Iraq war – a war of choice – not been a “sacrifice-free” war for most Americans, they would have found it harder to polarize the populace so effectively. Also, if President Bush has been unable to convince a majority of Americans as to the reasons for continuing with the Iraq war, now in its fifth year, he is going to find it increasingly difficult to win there. It can therefore be argued that it is the president who is being unpatriotic by deliberately persisting with a policy that most Americans believe is causing long term damage to the foreign policy and overall reputation of the United States?

Is it any wonder then that we had neoconservative David Brooks lamenting in his recent New York Times column that “a new Republican governing philosophy did not emerge” prior to the last election? Mr. Brooks even suggested that the GOP needed to “shift mentalities.” If this is any indication that the neoconservative movement has finally started to unravel, there still maybe hope going forward. It should clearly begin with a new direction in U.S. foreign policy – one that will take the high road to restore the principles, respect, and leadership of the United States, and one that let all the neocons bail out at the last exit entitled, “My Way.”

Blog Hits 4 Bush

2007-03-27T21:31:00.000-04:00

The Supreme Court recently heard a case relating to the First Amendment rights of an Alaskan high school kid. This smart aleck was chastised by his school principal because he held up a sign – outside school property and hence its jurisdiction – that read “Bong Hits 4 Jesus.”

There were two things that struck me about this case. My initial reaction was – wow! Doesn’t the Supreme Court have enough of a case load without wanting to waste its time on an appeal as seemingly “dopey” as this? But in a more serious vein, I wondered – will this august body ever review more significant First Amendment violations, inherent in Sections 215 and 505 of the Patriot Act, that were imposed upon the larger American public by President Bush?

Fortunately, in this age of interactive digital communications, redress is a click away and in a medium where substance often trumps style. The classical sound bite that used to be proffered by a select few is being superseded by a plethora of instantaneous “vivoda” bytes. This multiplex of video, voice, and data opinions is being constantly disseminated by the people, for the people, and to the people. Welcome to the blogosphere – a fundamental instrument of 21st century democracy!

One would have thought that the Bush Administration would have learned by now that responsibility is when you acknowledge your mistake; accountability is when you pay for it. Oftentimes one can pay for a mistake through a sincere apology, but sometimes the gravity of the blunder is such that it necessitates the perpetrator’s resignation or dismissal from said position of responsibility. Each of the recent major gaffes committed by various Bush Administration officials require a resolution that satisfies the public trust.

In “Walter Gate” the Bush Administration was clearly worried of losing a core Republican constituency – the U.S. military and their families – had the scandal not been quickly contained. As a result, Army Secretary Francis Harvey resigned, Army Surgeon General Kevin Kiley retired, and Walter Reed commander George Weightman was fired. They were all forced to take one for Team Bush so that the Administration could actually be seen as “walking its signature ‘support the troops’ talk.”

In “Libby Date” Vice President Cheney’s former chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, found it difficult to keep track of dates – and, when he had told or heard, what from or to whom – regarding the outing of CIA operative, Valerie Plame. A jury found him guilty of perjury and obstruction of justice and he now faces a June sentencing date with the judge. Per blogger speculation, Libby could get anywhere from 15 months to three years in jail. My own take on an intensely debated presidential pardon for Libby appeared in a letter to the New York Times on March 8, 2007.

In the “Attorneys Fate” fiasco, the blogosphere has more or less concurred with the mainstream media that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales will sooner than later meet the same fate as his “non-performing” U.S. Attorneys.

In the “Gay Hate” rant, General Peter Pace, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff shouldn’t be asked, but told by President Bush to issue an earnest apology for his abhorrent views. An initial surge of mainstream media opinions did make this demand, but corresponding blog hits did not keep up the pace. Nonetheless, the general needs to come out and apologize to all gays in general, but especially to those serving in uniform – and particularly to those risking their lives right now in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Finally, in the “FBI Bait” case, wherein hundreds of unauthorized national security letters (NSL) were issued to unsuspecting American citizens, President Bush needs to lift the gag order. This will allow bloggers an opportunity to legally do what the Washington Post afforded to an NSL recipient under cover of anonymity – an ability to exercise their First Amendment rights as guaranteed in the Constitution, so that they can continue to defend this self same Constitution from such egregious abuse in the future.

Since the WSJ editorial page actually ran a literal clarification for “Bong Hits 4 Jesus – Explained” – I thought it my help to know that the “hits” in my title don’t have anything to do with web statistics. They are simply good old fashioned hits – that represent feedback from the people to the president of the United States – and I can only hope that POTUS is listening!

The Political Pendulum: Swinging to Liberalism

2007-03-23T17:07:00.000-04:00

There appears to be a karmic cycle in U.S. political ideology based on the political history of what is known as the "American century." A cursory analysis shows that U.S. political philosophy has followed a simple undulating pattern since the early 20th century.

The 1930s were a transitional decade from the roaring twenties – with the laissez-faire business policies pursued by Republican presidents, Harding and Coolidge – to the New Deal programs that were ushered in by Democratic president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), during the Great Depression.

The 1940s through 1960s defined the Liberal Era, which commenced under FDR – who went on to become the "demigod" of the Democratic Party. This progressive age witnessed unprecedented domestic reforms beginning with the landmark 1954 Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education outlawing segregation in public education, to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This golden age of liberalism also saw U.S. foreign policy in ascendant starting with the victory of our greatest generation in World War II, to the containment of communism during a prolonged Cold War, and culminating with a triumph in space over the Soviet Union by that visionary "leap for mankind" pre-ordained in the days of Camelot by President John F. Kennedy. Nonetheless, this exigent age also included an "Ozzie and Harriet" decade in the 1950s under the era's only Republican Administration led by President Eisenhower.

The 1970s became the next transitional decade from the swinging sixties – with the Great Society programs pursued by Democratic president, Lyndon Baines Johnson – to the initial chaos of Watergate and Vietnam under Republican presidents, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford; and to the latter turmoil of stagflation and the Iranian hostage crisis under Democratic president, Jimmy Carter.

The 1980s through 2000s define the Conservative Era, which began under President Reagan – who is now revered as the "icon" of the Republican Party. This restoration age gave birth to supply-side economics, has produced over 45 million jobs to-date while simultaneously taming inflation, and has seen a critical tilt in the U.S. Supreme Court toward starboard. This heyday of conservatism has also seen U.S. foreign policy reach an early crescendo with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent collapse of the "evil empire" to end the Cold War. However, following the attacks of 9/11, we have seen the advent of the Bush Doctrine and a new long "war on terror." Nonetheless, this challenging age also had an intervening decade of "peace and prosperity" in the 1990s under the era's only Democratic Administration led by President Clinton.

Based on this karmic cycle, one can expect to live through another transitional decade in the 2010s as the U.S. adjusts to the dawn of a new liberal era. However, as President Nixon did in 1969 with an unpopular war in Vietnam, the new president in 2009 will face a similar testing time trying to end America's involvement in another unpopular war in Iraq.

One can only hope that U.S. political history will be as instructive to the new president in 2009 as U.S. political karma should be to all of us? For the great American philosopher, George Santayana, had wisely intoned at the start of the great American century,

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

The Only Way Out of Iraq

2007-03-19T17:29:00.000-04:00

On the eve of the fourth anniversary of the Iraq war, the Washington Post editors did an insightful take on the “Lessons of War.” This editorial was all the more conspicuous by the absence of the word “Islam” in any form throughout their analysis. This is a vital lesson that the Bush Administration and its neocon advisors have refused to learn during the four year occupation of Iraq. While the Administration might insist on Iraq being the “central front in the war on terror,” it really does not need to associate any of its brutal aspects with Islam. After all there are approximately 1.3 billion Muslims in the world, including about 5 million in the United States.

Having said that, any resolution to our involvement in Iraq will come from an answer to this key question that must be determined by polling the Iraqi people:Are you Iraqi first and Muslim second, or are you Muslim first and Iraqi second?

If a majority of the Iraqis consider themselves Iraqi first, only then is it likely that President Bush’s current surge strategy will succeed. If a majority of the Iraqis consider themselves Muslim first, it is highly unlikely that any military solution – including the current surge strategy – is going to achieve the desired results. And, if this is indeed the case, the Bush Administration definitely needs to keep Islam out of the equation and pursue a purely political solution for Iraq.

The natural follow-up question to the “Muslim first” Iraqis would be: Are you a Muslim first and Shia/Sunni second, or are you Shia/Sunni first and Muslim second?
However, this question seems redundant given that Iraqis have been involved, for over a year now, in a sectarian conflict – which is also a confirmation that they have pretty much put religion before country as well.

So if they are Shia/Sunni first, Muslim second and only then Iraqi, it would seem to me that we are inevitably headed for a modified but non-planned version of the Biden-Gelb plan – a violent trifurcation of Iraq without any central control.

Even if we did manage to bring a temporary peace to Baghdad and trained the Iraqi army for what it's worth, can we really teach the Iraqi people patriotism and love of country over religion, when they have clearly shown a preference for their different strains of Islam? This is the real lesson to be learned from not only the Iraq War, but also the larger war on terror – we have to get religion out of the equation because nobody is going to concede that they are the children of a lesser god. Hasn’t history repeatedly taught us that indelible lesson?

I would hope it has. The only way left to get religion out of the equation, even at this late stage, is by co-opting friendly Muslim nations with sizeable armies to join U.S. forces in bringing peace to Iraq. This strategy might seem like naïveté, but we do provide large economic and military assistance to allies like Egypt, Jordan, Pakistan, and Turkey. It is time President Bush leaned on them to provide military personnel to help us complete our mission in Iraq. It’s only after friendly Muslim armies join us in Iraq that the local population will quickly assert the primacy of its Iraqi character – thereby ensuring our mission in Iraq will succeed. As we start our fifth year of occupation, this now appears to be the only way out of Iraq!

Gore's Karmic Cycle

2007-03-06T14:22:00.000-05:00

Democrats are not going to like this comparison but there seems to be an uncanny parallel thus far between the political careers of Richard M. Nixon and Albert A. Gore, Jr.

Nixon served as a reserve officer in the US Navy during World War II, as a Congressman in the US House of Representatives (1947-1950), as a US Senator (1951-52), and as Vice President of the United States (1952-1960).

Gore served as a journalist in the US Army during the Vietnam War, as a Congressman in the US House of Representatives (1977-1984), as a US Senator (1985-92), and as Vice President of the United States (1993-2000).

In 1960 Nixon narrowly lost the presidency to Kennedy by a 0.2% margin in the popular vote and there were allegations of voter fraud in Illinois where a few thousand votes separated the two candidates.

In 2000 Gore lost the presidency to Bush despite winning the popular vote by a 0.5% margin and there were allegations of voter fraud in Florida where a few hundred votes separated the two candidates.

Two years after losing the presidency, Nixon made his famous declaration, "You won't have Nixon to kick around anymore, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference" while acknowledging defeat in the 1962 California governor's race.

Two years after losing the presidency, Gore revealed his position regarding a 2004 rerun, "I've decided that I will not be a candidate," in an interview on the CBS News program "60 Minutes." This announcement came the day after Gore became the first former Vice President to host NBC's "Saturday Night Live."

In the six years that followed Nixon's "last press conference", the United States got involved in Vietnam in what began as a noble attempt at preventing Southeast Asia from succumbing to communist influence (under the auspices of the Communist Domino theory). By 1968, popular opinion had turned against the Vietnam War.

In the four years to-date after Gore's "SNL" and "60 Minutes" appearances, the United States got involved in Iraq in what began as a convoluted attempt at linking Saddam Hussein to 9/11, to stockpiles of WMD, and to the broader war on terror (under the auspices of the Bush Doctrine). By 2007, popular opinion had turned against the Iraq War.

Nearly eight years after losing his first run for president, Richard Nixon won the Republican Party's nomination once again in 1968 by defeating challenges from Nelson Rockefeller, Ronald Reagan, and George Romney. Nixon appealed to his conservative base by promising that "new leadership will end the war and win the peace in the Pacific." On November 5, 1968 Nixon, in his second attempt, was successfully elected 37th president of the United States.

My comparison stops at this point, but with Gore's recent resurgence with the American public and in the media, speculation is ripe that he will emulate his karmic equivalent and enter the 2008 race for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Given his winning positions on contemporary issues of the day ranging from the environment to the country's broader foreign policy problems, it shouldn't be hard for Gore to neutralize Senator Clinton's current front runner status in the Democratic slate of presidential candidates. Gore could do this more effectively by co-opting Senator Obama early on to provide Democrats with the winning ticket in 2008. It could very well launch the start of "GoreObamania" and hopefully close the loop on Gore's karmic cycle on November 4, 2008.

Paradigm Shift in U.S. Foreign Policy

2007-02-27T19:01:00.000-05:00

A little over a year before the U.S. Supreme Court narrowly voted in his favor as President-elect, George W. Bush had been unable to name the foreign leaders of either the world's largest democracy, India, or its neighbor, Pakistan – which was soon to become a critical "ally" in the ensuing global war on terror.

An on-the-job training exercise that began with a botched air skirmish with China in the spring of 2001 continues to this day. The world has witnessed a series of bungled Bush foreign policy efforts that now include Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Pakistan and even Russia.

Senator Clinton launched her 2008 presidential campaign with a catchy phrase, when she declared, "…I'm in it to win it." President Bush and Prime Minister Blair would each have the world believe that this same phrase applies to their adamant positions on Iraq. It boggles one’s mind, nonetheless, that their recent contradictory moves on troop strength – Bush is surging while Blair is purging – have to be accepted by a more rational American public as, in Vice President Cheney’s own words, "…things are going pretty well."

When was the last time that the U.S. was so bitterly divided over a war? It was during the Vietnam War, when a majority of the American people believed that they had been lied to or deceived. In a karmic sense of déjà vu, the American public is once again witnessing the inability of a U.S. Administration – driven more by ego and less by principle – to accept reality. It is also quite obvious that the Bush Administration will continue to be, with apologies to Senator Clinton, “in it to spin it" until the political process forces a necessary change in leadership.

In an ironic reversal of roles, art has been imitating life in these United States where Hollywood has been taking its cue from Washington. Viewers of the popular TV series "24" cannot help but notice that this fictional show has more or less been following the script of the real life Bush Administration in these past couple of seasons. In both instances, members of the Administration seem to "love" their country more than its constitution – if that is even possible – and seem to be deluded into believing that their “unconditional love” puts them above the law?

Unfortunately, in the real world, the U.S. has been left with little control over its foreign policy. The primary lesson coming off the Bush Doctrine is that the U.S. must never use preemptive military power, unless it is certain that it will help attain attendant political objectives. The adjunct message is that if the military objective has been achieved, but the corresponding political objectives do not follow, the application of more military power is unlikely to yield the desired results.

So where does this leave the Foreign Policy of the United States (FPOTUS)? It might help if President Bush were to revisit recent FPOTUS history. Years before President Reagan initiated his long term FPOTUS strategy to win the Cold War; President Nixon had done the spade work by introducing a paradigm shift in the FPOTUS by opening a critical door – to China! This dramatic change was based on a simple principle – the enemy (China) of my enemy (Soviet Union) is my friend – that helped bring the Cold War closer to the "evil empire's" home and initiate its eventual collapse.

After 9/11 the United States government was accused of being unable to think outside the box. The FPOTUS under the Bush Administration has been stuck inside a “neocon” box, which has released “Pandoras” that they have been unable to control. In attempting to resolve the current mess in the Middle East, President Bush might want to opt for a paradigm shift in the FPOTUS. The enemy (Shia Iran) of my enemy (Sunni Al Qaeda) could radically alter the dynamics of the global war on terror and help return control of the FPOTUS to a weakened presidency.

Why are we so awful at foreign policy?

2007-01-14T00:53:00.000-05:00

In his New York Times column, “Stumbling Around the World”, Nicholas Kristof begs an answer to the question: Why are we so awful at foreign policy? Before I attempt to answer this question, I would like to cite two examples provided by Mr. Kristof:

Iraq is the example of the moment. We invaded, thinking that we would get a pro-American bulwark, cheap oil, long-term military bases and the gratitude of liberated Iraqis. Instead, we fought Iraq, and Iran won.

Speaking of which, look at Iran. In 1953, we helped overthrow the democratically elected prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh, to achieve a more pro-Western government. That created tensions that led to the Iranian revolution of 1979 and the rise of mullahs with nuclear dreams. If it weren’t for our own policies, Iran might well now have a pro-American government.

Not surprisingly, since World War II, a linkage can be established between America’s preemptive wars/wars of choice and their desired outcomes: they have invariably failed and set back U.S. foreign policy for decades. In fact, if the target country had just two of its three defining national characteristics – language, religion, and form of government – differ widely from that of the western world, then invariably U.S. political objectives in a lengthy preemptive war (i.e. a war of choice) were never met.

In fact, even the short, CIA-supported, 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba failed to overthrow Fidel Castro and helped further solidify Cuba's relationship with the Soviet Union. Forty five years later Castro is still around and Cuba remains standing as one of the last vestiges of the communist dominoes.

Over fifty years after the Korean Armistice and thirty odd years after our ignominious withdrawal from Saigon – North Korea and Vietnam remain as the other glaring examples of communist dominoes that our failed foreign policy ventures have left standing.

President Bush is now trying hard to prevent yet another U.S. foreign policy domino theory – the Bush Doctrine, which calls for pre-emptive action against states that pursue WMD programs and/or support terrorism in the name of religion – from failing in Iraq and spreading undesirable outcomes throughout the Middle East. If we fail in Iraq, the Bush Administration is concerned that Iran and Syria will be the next dominoes to fall – in that, they will acquire WMD and more overtly support terrorist acts against western interests around the world.

My answer to Mr. Kristof’s question can be found in a letter of mine that was published in The Wall Street Journal on October 6, 2006:

We continue to talk about the "root cause of terrorism," but there seems to be a basic disconnect between the Judeo-Christian and Muslim worlds' reasoning on this issue. Muslim dictators use their convenient line that "Palestine is the core issue," while Western leaders seem to have coalesced on "freedom and democracy" as being their core issue in the post-9/11 era.
The U.S. could make serious progress with this reasoning if it showed some consistency in the application of its core values to its foreign policy. This would necessarily imply that we make no exceptions of convenience even in the short-term: Musharraf, Mubarak, Nazarbayev, Abdallah, et al. We insult the intelligence of the common Muslim populace with these exceptions of convenience -- this is the core issue, it seems to me.

The bottom line is that we are so awful at foreign policy because it is not consistent, it does not reflect our core values, and we make too many exceptions of convenience.

The Clock Is Ticking On Iraq

2007-01-12T22:47:00.000-05:00

Pundits have compared President Bush's escalation of the Iraq war to President Nixon's April 1970 decision to invade Cambodia as a means to a successful withdrawal from Vietnam. Five years later we were fleeing from the rooftop of the US embassy in Saigon – a lesson that our current president seems to have forgotten.

The key difference between Vietnam and Iraq is quite stark. An ethnically homogeneous Vietnam had been split into a communist North and democratic South as a reflection of larger Cold War rivalries. After the fall of Saigon, the reintegration of Vietnam was traumatic but successful. By contrast, Iraq as a nation was created by the British from three ethnically diverse regions – a largely Shia south, a primarily Kurdish north, and a mostly Sunni west – that have historically been at odds. Any wonder then that a Baathist dictator – not surprisingly, secular in his outlook – held the country together for almost three decades by brute force?

The sectarian strife in Iraq reached a tipping point almost a year ago, when Shiite Islam's holiest shrine in Samarra was destroyed by Sunni insurgents. Then the recent retaliatory and ham-handed execution of Saddam Hussein by a vengeful Shiite government more or less ensured that Iraqis had reached a point of no return in their attempts at keeping a united Iraq. So it has become almost impossible now for any western nation to try and secure Iraq in the short term.

NBC's Tim Russert was absolutely right when he called President Bush's proposal a "double or nothing" gambit, which is sure to, as the New York Times put it, "run out the clock and leave his mess for the next one." Unfortunately, the real disaster would be inherited by the next president who, in attempting to sort out President Bush's mess, will likely be doomed to one term. It therefore makes sense for Democrats and Republicans alike to coalesce around the May 2006 Biden-Gelb plan and ensure its success by involving all of Iraq's six neighbors in immediate discussions to fine tune and implement it. We need to act post-haste before the clock runs out on the only workable option for Iraq – a return to pre-British historical boundaries that had evolved naturally and co-existed in the pre-colonial era.

A True Council for Real Security

2007-01-06T18:19:00.000-05:00

For "Saturday Night Live" fans, it shouldn't be hard to recall an emotion made famous by comedian Mike Myers in the late eighties. So readers will understand when I suggest that an ineffective UN Security Council has been making me "vaklempt" for quite some time now. With apologies to Mr. Myers, I'd actually express my feelings this way:

"Hi, this is Linda Richman. I'm vaklempt! Excuse me… talk amongst yourselves! Here, let me give you a topic: The Security Council is neither making the world really secure these days, nor is it a truly representative council of today's world. Discuss."

On December 23rd a tepid Security Council unanimously passed a watered-down sanctions resolution against Iran. Do these resolutions mean anything anymore – unless they are required as some sort of justification prior to military action against a condemned country? And, what's with this need for unanimity – which is invariably inversely proportional to the efficacy of the resolution being passed. Besides, unanimity in democratic forums is almost oxymoronic. In any case, Russia and China got western nations to so dilute the sanctions against Iran that they might as well have not passed any resolution – because it resolves nothing, nada, zip, zero…

In 2006 alone, the Security Council has passed eight different resolutions on the "Situation in the Middle East" – has this made the Middle East even appear any more secure than it was last year? The Security Council also seems to have passed a resolution for every country on the African continent in 2006 – but do we see any improvements in Darfur or Somalia? What is the point in a world body that seems to spend countless hours talking up a storm, but ends up effectively doing nothing?

President Bush appointed John Bolton as our Permanent U.S. Representative to the United Nations with the hope that Ambassador Bolton would shake things up from its foundation as opposed to its top ten stories that he had once joked were irrelevant. But alas, the UN bureaucracy is too deep-rooted for even a straight-talking US Ambassador to loosen up in a couple of years. We need to approach this step-by-step and my first step would be to abolish the UN General Assembly. But knowing that this body of perpetually dissatisfied and largely third world dilettantes is going nowhere real fast, I would rather tackle reforming the UN Security Council on a priority basis.

It should be apparent to any rational person that the five veto-wielding members of the Security Council represent a world that existed in 1945. In the six decades since, the economic and geo-political realities of the world have substantially changed, but these have not been reflected in the make up of the Security Council. The first thing we all need to agree upon is that the veto-wielding membership needs to be raised from five to eight. The second thing that we can all easily agree upon is that France no longer deserves to be a veto-wielding member. Au Revoir, Mon Ami. No hard feelings, but Germany is now certainly more representative of the European Union than vous.

So the U.S., the U.K., Germany, Russia, and China will become the five veto-wielding members of the new Security Council. With Asia and the Far East making up nearly half of the world's population, it's a no-brainer that they should get at least four of the eight veto-wielding seats in the new Security Council. If Russia and China take up two of these four Asia/Far East slots, it's apparent that India (with its one-sixth of humanity and an exploding economy) and Japan (the world's second largest economy) qualify for the other two Asia/Far East positions. Finally, it is rather obvious that Brazil should get to represent South America as a veto-wielding member of the new Security Council.

After this new Security Council has been in place for a decade, we might want to consider raising the veto-wielding membership to ten by adding a member each from Africa and Eastern Europe. However, for now, it would make sense for the incoming UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki Moon, to take the necessary steps to immediately increase the veto-wielding membership of the UN Security Council to eight nations as follows: United States of America, United Kingdom, Russia, China, Germany, India, Japan, and Brazil.

With this new Security Council in place in early 2007, we can look forward to seating a body that is truly representative of the world and thus making hopes for a real peace all the more plausible.

Capiche, Google?

2006-12-09T23:03:00.000-05:00

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the rave these days. SEO is an activity, which primarily involves ordinary human beings trying to outsmart the programmed robots of the search engine gods. In the internet age, every individual’s life is being exposed in some arbitrary fashion via a random listing of SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages).

As a regular “searcher” myself, I rarely go beyond the first couple of SERPs on the “searchees” that I occasionally Google. I have therefore concluded that I need to take control of my own destiny and ensure that the two people (my wife and my dog) who might someday Google me get to see the “Jack Nargundkar” SERPs of my choosing! So this blog is my very own SEO exercise to influence the appearance of those initial SERPs, when my wife finally decides to Google me. Apparently, one of the tricks is providing the desired links in a blog such as this to pages that you wish to appear upfront in the SERPs. So here goes:

Jack Nargundkar in the New York Times on November 3, 2006, "A Man, a Cab, a Cellphone, a Laptop"

Jack Nargundkar in the Wall Street Journal on October 24, 2006, "Counting War Dead Is Difficult -- Therefore, Let's Not Exaggerate"

Jack Nargundkar in the Wall Street Journal on October 6, 2006, "Musharraf May Be Our Fair-Haired Boy Now . . . But Watch Out"

Jack Nargundkar in the New York Times on September 4, 2006, "Are We Seeing a Half-Empty Glass?"

Jack Nargundkar in the Washington Post on July 29, 2006, "Still Dreaming"

Jack Nargundkar in the New York Times on March 8, 2006, "Bush and the Nuclear Subcontinent"

Jack Nargundkar in the New York Times on January 8, 2006, "Other Voices: How The Times Handled the Surveillance Story"

Jack Nargundkar in the Washington Post on April 11, 2005, "No Individual Blamed"

Jack Nargundkar in the New York Times on April 1, 2005, "A Life Ends, and a Nation Pauses to Reflect"

Jack Nargundkar in the New York Times on December 16, 2004, "Medals at Odds With Reality of War"

Jack Nargundkar in the Washington Post on May 27, 2004, "Punctuate a Comma Date"

Jack Nargundkar in the Washington Post on February 4, 2004, "Screening Bush: The Winners"

Jack Nargundkar in the Washington Post on December 5, 2003, "'Cut and Run' and the Right Approach in Iraq"

Jack Nargundkar in the Business Week on December 29, 2003, "The Challenge From India"

Jack Nargundkar in the Washington Post on April 12, 2003, "Next Steps on Iraq"

These are links to my letters that have been published in the The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and Business Week in the past three years. As a budding writer I would like to see these articles appear in the first couple of pages of my SERPs. Capiche, Google? My wife then might finally come round to believing that someday I could make a living as a writer!

Saving President Bush

2006-12-02T20:13:00.000-05:00

While answering a question relating to the “war on terror” in August 2004, President Bush told Matt Lauer on NBC’s “Today” show,

“I don’t think you can win it. But I think you can create conditions so that those who use terror as a tool are less acceptable in parts of the world — let's put it that way.”

With his then reelection a little over two months away, the President soon backtracked on the “cannot win it” part.

In September 2006 the New York Times published part of a leaked National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) report, which suggested that the war in Iraq had only made the terrorism problem worse? Shortly after 9/11 and prior to the start of the Iraq war, the Bush Administration’s rhetoric was nowhere as critical of and as closely tied to the religious aspects of the “war on terror”. It is apparent that the Administration’s increasingly pointed linkage of Islam to terror has been directly proportional to the deteriorating situation in Iraq. In the lead up to the 2006 elections, we heard new phrases such as “Islamo-fascist”, “Islamic Caliphate”, “Islamic Totalitarianism”, “Islamism” enter the public consciousness. Such linkages inflamed not only the faithful but also the long dormant – as has been evidenced by the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

President Bush must surely know that there are over one billion Muslims in the world, totaling nearly one-sixth of humanity. He cannot continue to associate their religion with historically unpopular political dogma such as fascism, totalitarianism, caliphates, etc. and still expect to “create conditions” that come even remotely close to winning a “war on terror”. By conflating religion with politics, President Bush is making his own gut pronouncement to Matt Lauer come true – effectively putting victory, in what he has called the “defining struggle of the 21st century”, out of the western world’s reach.

With a Democratic Congress now ready to take over, we can finally expect some meaningful oversight of the President’s foreign policy. Unfortunately, trying to hold the President accountable for bad policy does not necessarily help make that policy better. One can only hope that the Iraq Study Group’s forthcoming recommendations make some progress in this regard. Nevertheless, I too would like to propose a new strategic direction for the larger foreign policy of the United States – one that I believe will help in saving President Bush. It may not guarantee him an enduring legacy, but I believe my five-point plan will help restore our country’s respect and leadership in the world.

1. Declare an end to the amorphous “global war on terror”.

The “war on terror” has been irrevocably lost, since it has become so clearly demarcated along religious lines both within and outside of Iraq. This is a war that should have never been explicitly declared, much less overtly fought. Following the attacks of 9/11, we knew exactly who its perpetrator (Osama Bin Laden) was and in which country he was based (Afghanistan). It was a no-brainer to declare war on Afghanistan, topple its government (the Taliban), and try to bring this perpetrator to justice.

We also knew that the perpetrator’s organization, Al Qaeda, had a network of terror cells around the world. We even surmised that many of these cells were organized as sleeper cells in various nations that were both friendly and unfriendly to the United States. Thus it should have been obvious that the disparate structure of this terror network would make an overt “war on terror” very difficult to successfully execute on a sustained basis. Following our overt military action in Afghanistan, we should have engaged the remainder of this terror network in a long “silent war” with the help of key western allies. The objective of this silent war would be to root out these terror cells around the world via covert action using “Special Ops” forces as and when required. In fact, I had recommended this “Silent War Doctrine” as a counter to the Bush Doctrine back in December 2001.

The Bush Administration’s conduct of the Iraq war, as a continuation of the global war on terror, has been an unmitigated disaster. Even if this had not been the original intent, it has become apparent that the Iraq war is causing the global war on terror to degenerate into a religious divide between the Judeo-Christian and Muslim worlds. There cannot conceivably be a healthy conclusion to a modern day crusade of this kind – as a result, we need to bring about a quick end to our occupation of Iraq. More importantly, we must find and kill Osama Bin Laden – even if this means reinforcing American troop strength in Afghanistan and engaging the Taliban inside Pakistan. After Osama Bin Laden has been taken “dead or alive”, we should declare an end to the overt global war on terror and let a covert silent war take its place to fulfill our ongoing post-9/11 objectives.

2. Dissolve the “axis of evil” and engage its two recalcitrant members in direct talks.

The reference to “axis of evil” was an unwise piece of rhetoric that should have never seen light of day and I indicated as much in an article that I wrote shortly after President Bush’s 2002 state of the union address, which gave birth to this monstrosity. Bush might have intended to emulate Reagan’s evil empire comparison – but Reagan took on an actual empire, with which there were no religious or theological affiliations to consider. Ironically, the application of the so-called Bush Doctrine to the first member of the axis of evil (Iraq) has resulted in the other two charter members of the axis of evil (Iran & North Korea) actually hastening their respective programs to acquire weapons of mass destruction. With preemptive action against these two nations no longer a viable option, diplomacy can make progress only if these nations are no longer vilified. In the long run, we stand to lose more by not talking directly with Iran and North Korea. If engaging these nations in direct talks requires that we “change our attitude”, we should do so – because it’s time that the Bush Administration realized that substance (producing meaningful outcomes) will eventually trump style (demanding or expecting certain types of behavior from lesser nations). As an indicator of our change in attitude towards Iran, President Bush must offer to re-establish diplomatic relations with Tehran.

3. Initiate “six-party talks” on a divided Iraq.

Shortly after the Biden-Gelb plan on Iraq appeared in the New York Times on May 1st, I endorsed it with the following qualifications in my blog dated May 6th:

“Most of the Biden-Gelb plan for “Unity Through Autonomy in Iraq” makes a lot of sense. However, it did not take into consideration one very important geo-political consideration that is critical to the plan’s success – Iraq’s neighbors. When Saddam was in power he was a constant threat to his neighbors. Once the United States withdraws and with no unifying authoritarian figure in control of Iraq, its neighbors will become a threat to its unity. We cannot forget that Iraq was a country created by the British from disparate nomadic regions. The Turks have had historical issues with the Kurds and Iran will continue to become increasingly influential and meddlesome with the autonomous Shia portion of Iraq. So we need to involve all of Iraq’s neighbors ¬– Iran, Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Turkey – upfront in a Dayton-type round of discussions to ensure that the Biden-Gelb plan is destined to succeed.”

Now, more than six months later, I might be so bold as to suggest that the Sunni region of Iraq might want to consider merging with Kuwait to ensure its economic survival – which would be an ironical but fitting twist to Saddam Hussein’s geopolitical mis-adventure of 1990. It is also apparent that the Shia region of Iraq will become a satellite state of Iran, in effect delivering Iran a much-belated victory in its 1980-88 war with Iraq. In order for the Kurdish region to survive a combined Turkish and Iranian threat, we will need to maintain substantial troop strength there for several years – as we have done in South Korea.

4. Appoint President Clinton as Special Ambassador to the Middle East.

There can be no long-term peace in the Middle East until we successfully resolve the Israeli-Palestine problem. President Clinton got very close in 2000 but was betrayed by a greedy Yasser Arafat, who was not happy with the return of 97% of the occupied territories, including joint-control of Jerusalem. With Arafat out of the picture and his Fatah party feuding with Hamas, now might be a good time to mediate a new peace settlement. President Bush can condition his re-establishment of diplomatic relations with Iran to their intervening with Hamas in the West Bank and Hezbollah in Lebanon. He can then appoint President Clinton as his special ambassador to the region with cabinet rank and full authority to negotiate a 2000-style peace accord.

5. Accept the resignation of Vice President Cheney and appoint a prominent Muslim-American to his cabinet.

President Bush must realize by now that the failure of his foreign policy has been largely due to an aggressive Vice President and his band of neoconservative advisors. The firing of Defense Secretary Rumsfeld can only be the first step in the rejection of a failed “stay the course” strategy. Conservative writer, Peggy Noonan, was on to something when she had headlined a column back in February, “Hit Refresh? Why Bush may be thinking about replacing Cheney.” If he wasn’t thinking about it then, he must do so now – a revised Bush foreign policy has no chance of succeeding in the next two years with its old architect still around. Ms. Noonan was right – a Cheney replacement would have two years to be groomed as a logical successor to President Bush in 2008. John McCain would be a good choice.

Finally, President Bush must appoint a prominent Muslim-American to his cabinet. This would be a terrific gesture to not only the Muslims at home, but it would also show Muslims worldwide that we are a tolerant and inclusive society. There is no vacancy in the cabinet right now, but if someone were to resign, I think such an appointment would go a long way in defusing tensions in the Muslim world more than anything else.

What happened to white America?

2006-11-23T17:39:00.000-05:00

In his New York Times column of July 4th, with the attention-grabbing title “Disunited States of America”, John Tierney contemplated Americans acting like “the Red people in the South and the Blue people in the North had a border between them”. Ouch! Not exactly our very own version of a Shia-Sunni divide, but one that is becoming more and more jarring with each passing election.

In 1984 Ronald Reagan won reelection by a landslide capturing 49 of 50 states. Yet I can’t remember any divisive debates about red states and blue states from that era. In fact, the only red state that President Reagan was focused on back then was the one he derisively referred to as “the evil empire” – which he was passionate about defeating. And, the only ridicule that I recall following that lopsided election was a cartoon depicting the lonely “blue” state of Minnesota – as a part of Canada! The rest of the 49 states were not considered “red” – they just happened to represent the “United” States of America.

It was only after the split election of 2000 that the red state-blue state dichotomy began to get deeply ingrained into the American psyche. Candidate Bush, who had promised throughout that campaign to be a uniter and not a divider, ascended to the presidency despite losing the popular vote. President Bush then chose to further alienate the red and blue states throughout his first term. In fact, he successfully used this divisive “politics of color” to win reelection in 2004. In spite of a narrow victory, he claimed to have gained “political capital”.

He quickly managed to spend that capital and some. One would have hoped that the outcome of the 2006 mid-term elections would inject a dose of reality into the remaining two years of his presidency. However, recent indications from the White House seem to suggest that “stay the course”, on all manner of Bush policy, is here to stay – in spite of the American people having expressed their displeasure at the status quo.

The Clinton impeachment over lying about a personal indiscretion now seems Kafkaesque in its absurdity when compared to the steady string of whoppers that the Bush Administration has fed us over the past six years regarding vital matters of state. Nonetheless, impeaching this president, especially in a time of war, would be a cop out – it is imperative that President Bush get us out of the mess that his own “untruths” have created. We the people have elected a Democratic Congress so that we can finally hold the Bush Administration accountable for its actions.

Through his rash conduct of foreign policy, President Bush has seriously degraded the reputation and standing of the United States in the eyes of the world. It is imperative that we set our differences aside in our attempts to repair our international image. In the spirit of which I ask this seemingly provocative question “What happened to white America?” However, I do not ask this question in a pejorative manner implying race, but in the patriotic spirit of red, white and blue! Instead of our constant focus on red vs. blue in every aspect of policy making, I suggest that we all look at a compromising, neutral “white” – which could become the bright white light of enlightenment that guides US to glory!

The Accidental Pundit

2006-11-09T23:36:00.000-05:00

It was the best birthday present that I had received in a long time. In the wee hours of the morning of November 8, 2006, about 3.15 am to be precise, I decided to call it a night. The Democrats had recaptured the House and they were just 2 seats shy from getting control of the Senate – it was time to get some shut-eye.

I awoke again at 5.30 am, only to learn that Burns and Macaca were hanging in there – damn, why couldn’t they just throw in the towel? Nevertheless, it turned out to be the birthday that kept on giving. President Bush called a press conference at 1 pm to announce that he had fired Defense Secretary Rumsfeld. The president also announced that Bill Gates was taking over from Rummy!

I thought that was kind of weird – why would the President want the retired marketing genius from Microsoft running the Defense Department? Honestly, it was kind of late in the day to expect Iraq 3.0 to work. After all, Bill might do Windows and philanthropy well, but honestly what did he know about a war gone bad? Besides, Bill would just throw a whole lot of money and people into the mix – the President had already tried the former and consistently rejected the latter.

Suddenly the phone rang and I woke up. I had dozed off just as the President’s press conference got rolling. I had actually heard Bob Gates being mentioned and then drifted off into a blissful sleep… it was during that brief interlude that I got to wondering how on earth could the Microsoft marketing machine salvage Iraq, when those “nattering nabobs of neocons” had failed to do so?

My son was calling to say that he had been up until four that morning in his college dorm waiting for Burns to go down in flames. After we discussed the exciting turn of events, I let him into my little secret.

I sang it to him in my best Britney Spears imitation, “Oops, I did it again!”

“What on earth are you talking about, Dad?” my son asked in an exasperated voice.

“You are not going to believe this, Jay,” I said, “but I had entered Al Kamen’s ‘In the Loop’ contest about a month ago.”

“Oh, that Post guy who does all that sarcastic stuff on the Federal Page of ‘The Washington Post’?” Jay asked rather impatiently.

“That’s right, son. I had called the mid-term election in his contest as follows – 51 to 49 in favor of the Democrats in the Senate and 239 to 196 in favor of the Democrats in the House.” I said quite proudly.

“Wow! That’s great.” Jay replied.

“Yeah, but Macaca could throw a monkey-wrench into my Senate plan. I know Burns doesn’t have much fire left in him. Also, MSNBC is projecting the final House tally at 234-201 for the Dems. That ain’t bad. I think I am going to nail this puppy.” I told Jay quite animatedly.

Then I went on to remind him about my last great call on the eve of the millennium (December 31, 1999) – almost a year before that infamous 2000 election – when I had prophesized about the first split election in over a century! I still smart from the fact that I got no recognition for that prescient piece of punditry. Maybe if someone from Gore’s staff had read my piece (“Musings for the New Millennium”) in a timely fashion, they would have been better prepared to deal with those “hanging chads”.

Nonetheless, the inconvenient truth is I blew my subsequent predictions in 2002, when I wrote that the Democrats would capture the Senate 53-47, and in 2004 when I went out on a limb for Senator Kerry and “stuck” with a 53% to 47% victory in his favor! What had I been smokin’?

The moral of this story is that punditry has as much to do with your political skills, as it has to do with premonition and luck. Just ask triple-crown winner, Karl Rove, and all the conservative talk radio gasbags that he invited on to the lawns of the White House in the week prior to this election. They all blew so much hot air from under those tents that day, one could have floated across the mall and landed right on the steps of the Capitol to witness a new Republican Congress being sworn in.

In any event, as I write this, Macaca has decided to settle for the “real world of Virginia” and ride into the sunset (at least, for now). So I could hit the mother lode again this time, but I no longer pine for my fifteen minutes. I am trying to be happy just being an accidental pundit, who happens to get it right once in a while. But maybe just this one time, say, later “this week”, I would love to “meet the press” and then “face the nation” squarely – and, tell them about my plans for “Saving President Bush” (the title of my upcoming blog, which has a metaphorical reference to the movie, “Saving Private Ryan”).

With sincere apologies to Harold Ford, and minus the wink, I conclude my commercial with this appeal, “George, Tim, Bob… call me!”

A Consistent Foreign Policy Based on Core American Values – How Convenient?

2006-10-29T14:18:00.000-05:00

John Tierney, talking about Republican and Democratic stereotypes in the voters’ minds, wrote in his October 10th column in The New York Times, “At one time these stereotypes made sense, but not anymore.” But why would they? Back in 2000 would anyone have predicted that the party that would get – reckless about government spending, suffused by sexual scandals, tainted by powerful lobbyists, mired in another unpopular war, etc. – so removed from its traditional image, would be the party of Eisenhower and Reagan? Therefore it is not the voter who is confused, as Mr. Tierney implies in his column, but the GOP. Having been in control of both branches of our government for most of the past six years, the GOP seems to have lost its way.

This stereotype would have us believe that foreign policy has always been the strong suit in the GOP armor, especially after President Reagan’s efforts in ending the Cold War. However, in the aftermath of the Bush Doctrine, we have seen a litany of foreign policy setbacks. Afghanistan is witnessing a resurgence of the Taliban, Iraq seems to be mired in a civil war, Iran in brazen defiance of the UN is on the verge of going nuclear, and North Korea has already tested its first WMD. Even outside the "axis of evil", freedom and democracy seem to be stumbling?

It looks like Thailand did not get the State Department’s memo on President Bush’s preference for democracy over stability? With violence challenging the fledgling democracies produced by the Bush Doctrine, we cannot afford to have otherwise stable U.S. allies fall off the democracy wagon as well. In fact, Thailand could be sending the wrong message to Pakistan, whose General Musharraf might be now tempted to postpone general elections next year under the garb of ensuring stability for his country?

President Reagan is credited with having ended the Cold War but, in his October 25th column in The New York Times, Thomas Friedman resurrects what he calls “The Really Cold War”. Mr. Friedman’s “‘First Law of Petropolitics,’ which posits that the price of oil and the pace of freedom operate in an inverse relationship in petrolist states” is undoubtedly emboldening Russia to backslide on freedom and democracy. President Bush, who had “looked the man in the eye” back in 2001 and got “a sense of his soul”, has clearly misread Mr. Putin. In fact, Russia started a slow march away from freedom and democracy, soon after the ex-chief of the KGB took over as President on the eve of the new Millennium. The upsurge in the price of oil over the past couple of years has only hastened this march.

Mr. Friedman in another recent column also suggested that the rise in radical Islamic power has been directly proportional to the rise in the price of oil. Iran did not appear as much of a threat a couple of years ago when crude oil was under $40 a barrel. In the $60-$70 range, even the Shia in Iraq are having “pipe dreams” about ruling their own country without the “infidel Americans” – which is probably another reason why the sectarian violence there has spiraled towards civil war. It won’t be long before the Sunni oil cartel led by Saudi Arabia (another stable ally?) starts acting up, now that they don’t have to worry about Saddam Hussein any more? This is fallout from a wrong turn in the “war on terror” that the American taxpayer will be paying for a long time – at least, until we are no longer “addicted to oil”.

It is therefore quite distressing to watch President Bush fawn over petro-authoritarianists such as Russia’s Putin, Kazakhstan’s Nazarbayev, and Saudi Arabia’s Abdullah, while he simultaneously condemns leaders that he has never met such as North Korea’ Kim Jong Il, Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez. In the long run this inverted diplomacy could also prove to be a “lose-lose” approach in our overall foreign policy efforts.

Now does anyone in the Bush Administration really have a clue about the Middle East? Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had characterized the recent Israel-Lebanon conflict as the “birth pangs of a new Middle East” when civilians were being brutally killed on both sides. When a truce finally went into effect after a month of senseless fighting, Hezbollah (a U.S.-designated terrorist organization) appears to have emerged politically and morally stronger – and, the “new Middle East” seems to have been still born.

Then we had the transfer of fourteen suspected terrorists from secret CIA prisons to Guantanamo Bay. Not one of these fourteen prisoners is a national of Afghanistan, Iraq, or Iran. Nine of these fourteen terrorists were captured in Pakistan, a country that also contributed three of these high-value prisoners. It really makes one wonder on what basis President Bush constituted his “axis of evil” after the events of 9/11, which were largely planned in and executed by nationals of two of our allies – Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. It is almost like President Bush’s version of the Sun Tzu strategy, “Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.”

In any event, the transfer of these prisoners from secret CIA prisons to Guantanamo Bay was a forced result of the Supreme Court’s ruling in late June. Vice President Cheney did not help the United States’ already tarnished image on human rights, when he had this exchange (as reported in The Washington Post) with Scott Hennen, a conservative talk show host, in an interview on October 24th:

“Would you agree a dunk in water is a no-brainer if it can save lives?” Hennen asked.
“Well, it's a no-brainer for me,” Cheney said, “but for a while there, I was criticized as being the vice president for torture. We don’t torture. That’s not what we're involved in.”

Earlier in the summer, in another jarring reference, President Bush classified the people behind the London airlines plot as “Islamofascists”. By thus conflating religion with politics, which is what a made-up term such as "Islamofascists" does, the Bush Administration is effectively putting victory in the “war on terror” out of the western world’s reach. On Labor Day, the New York Times published my letter in which I had cautioned:

“…with the passage of time, this war is getting increasingly divided along religious lines. History has proved that religious fundamentalists are the last ones to accept that they are the children of a lesser god.”

President Bush must surely understand that Muslims make up one-sixth of the world’s population and trying to win a “war on terror” by associating their religion with fascism is simply foolhardy.

So Republicans, who often compare President Bush to President Reagan, would do well by reading George Will’s October 5th column in The Washington Post “What Goeth Before the Fall”. In it Mr. Will defines “unresolved tensions between, two flavors of conservatism -- Western and Southern”. In applying Mr. Will’s reasoning, I consider President Reagan as a western “libertarian” conservative, whereas President Bush is a southern “religious” one. The long Cold War was eventually won by a western conservative president at the helm. I believe that we will be hard-pressed to win a long “war on terror”, given its increasingly religious overtones, with a southern conservative president in charge.

Remember those two slogans – relating to his Iraq policy – that had been used effectively by President Bush during and after his successful 2004 reelection campaign up until very recently. The first catchphrase was “cut and run”, which is what he accused the Democrats would do, from Iraq. The other option was naturally to “stay the course”, which he proudly claimed the Republicans would continue to do under his leadership. But that was then and this is now – ten days prior to the 2006 mid-term election, which increasingly looks like it is going to be a 1994-style blowout – and, a very likely end to the long Republican stranglehold on Congress.

The president who claimed to never rule by polls seems to have finally been rattled by them. So President Bush did what he had accused Senator Kerry of doing all through the 2004 campaign – he flip-flopped on Iraq! The president finally “cut and run” on “stay the course” in Iraq, when he told George Stephanopoulos of ABC News on the October 22nd edition of “This Week”,

“Well, listen, we’ve never been stay the course, George.”

With that admission, President Bush appears to have overcome an unusually lengthy “state of denial” over his disastrous foreign policy undertaking in Iraq. However, I believe that it will take him equally long to acknowledge reality. I suspect that the Bush Administration and the GOP will go through the other four classical stages of coping with loss – anger (which will manifest itself in their reaction to the results of the upcoming midterm elections), bargaining (with a Democratic Congress in 2007 to contain their humiliation), depression (as 2008 nears, they might pretend not to care anymore), and finally, acceptance (arising more from a need to protect their legacy). Hopefully, some conscientious leader in the Bush Administration or the GOP will quickly seek to redeem the nation’s prestige before any attempts at salvaging their own pride?

Meanwhile the road to the other “state of denial”, a.k.a. Darfur, littered with corpses, will have to unfortunately wait its turn – wait, to even make it onto our foreign policy agenda in the near future, since our human rights agenda has been severely compromised by this wrong turn in the “war on terror”. However, we could start to make at least some headway in addressing the root cause of terrorism, if we at least tried what I had suggested in my October 6th letter to The Wall Street Journal:

“The U.S. could make serious progress with this reasoning if it showed some consistency in the application of its core values to its foreign policy. This would necessarily imply that we make no exceptions of convenience even in the short-term: Musharraf, Mubarak, Nazarbayev, Abdallah, et al. We insult the intelligence of the common Muslim populace with these exceptions of convenience -- this is the core issue, it seems to me.”

To my mind, it’s these three C’s of distinction in our foreign policy – core values, consistency, and no exceptions of convenience – that will restore the United States as a beacon of freedom and democracy throughout the world.

As Baghdad sizzles, Condi fiddles and Bush piddles over “Long War” riddle

2006-08-13T17:02:00.000-04:00

The Bush Administration has been trying to have it both ways since 9/11 in the security vs. liberty argument. At home their covert actions have been suggesting to us for some time that in order to ensure our security, we need to sacrifice some of our liberties. But then abroad, they have been pushing liberty at a tremendous expense of security – where far more innocent, non-American lives are being lost on a daily basis. This high incidence of “collateral damage” is not only morally repugnant, but also a cause for increasing disenchantment with America around the world.

To therefore help keep an increasingly skeptical American public engaged, the Bush Administration has begun drawing parallels between the longevity of the Cold War and what some in the Administration have been referring to lately as the “Long War” (a.k.a. the “War on Terror”). In any event, they cannot continue to unilaterally violate a sacrosanct principle common to these two ideological struggles: the preservation of liberty as enshrined in the Constitution. Ironically, the preservation of liberty – which their oxymoronic “Long War” policy now seeks to curtail in order to secure – was the rai•son d'être for the Cold War.

The genesis of the “Long War” was an attempt by the Bush Administration to establish a dubious link between Saddam Hussein to Al Qaeda and 9/11. This blatantly false equivalence was used as a rationalization to divert the true “war on terror” from Afghanistan to Iraq. To make matters worse, after no WMD were found in Iraq, the Bush Administration changed its phony primary objective to an even harder, secondary objective of “establishing democracy” in Iraq. In recent Senate testimony, the top two Pentagon officials politely suggested that it is hard for a democracy to function in the midst of a civil war. This stark testimony leaves President Bush with a Hobson’s choice – to continue to promote “democracy” or try to contain a civil war.

Is it any wonder then that almost 60% of the American public now believes that the Iraq war was a mistake? In the light of which, it is quite surprising that Senator Lieberman, a strong supporter of President Bush’s “Long War” policy, lost his primary bid for reelection in a deep blue state by only a narrow four point margin. One could conclude that Senator Lieberman took his constituents for granted and paid a price for it. However, based on his post-primary remarks, “For the sake of our state, our country and my party, I cannot and will not let that result stand” it appears that Bush-style hubris has infected Senator Lieberman as well.

The morning after his humiliating loss in the primary, Senator Lieberman proclaimed, “I am even more devoted to my state and my country,” as his justification for making an independent run in November. Senator Lieberman may think that he is putting his country first, but he is definitely putting himself second, and his party last among his priorities. He does not seem to care how his selfish power grab might affect the chances of his Democratic Party in winning back the Congress – ironically, from those very Republicans he now hopes will help elect him as an independent senator.

As far as the “Long War” is concerned, it’s quite apparent that both parties are playing politics with what “The Daily Show” host, Jon Stewart, so presciently called “Mess-O-Potamia” shortly after it began. Many people now see President Bush’s “Long War” strategy as trying to “stay the course”, even if it’s a failing one, for the next two-and-one-half years – then to “get outta Dodge” and leave it to the next administration to clean up the mess. Personally, I had an epiphany while watching Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on a recent Sunday morning talk show. It seemed to me like she was fiddling while Baghdad was going up in flames. One can only hope that the larger American public will resist political fear mongering, as was witnessed in the aftermath of the foiled London plot last week, and hold the Bush Administration’s feet to this messianic fire of its own volition. As Baghdad sizzles, we can no longer afford to have Condi fiddle and Bush piddle with the “Long War” riddle – they either solve it or “Lamont” (i.e. lament) the consequences of a November tsunami!

Fear Leader

2006-07-30T13:23:00.000-04:00

The Bush Administration currently has foreign policy crises of gargantuan proportions on its hands: a worsening Iraqi sectarian war, a resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan, a defiant Iran in pursuit of nuclear weapons, belligerent North Korea launching missiles, and an Israeli-Lebanon war provoked by Iran and Syria. This sordid mess is both, direct and indirect fallout from a doctrine of unintended consequences – which is, nothing else but a catastrophic failure in the execution of the Bush Doctrine. All manner of pundits are seeing this preemption strategy for what it is now, but in the immediate aftermath of our glorious, albeit incomplete, triumph in Afghanistan it was largely praise when President Bush first outlined his provocative “axis of evil” policy. In an article, “State of the World”, written immediately after his 2002 State of the Union speech, I had made the following observations:

Buoyed by stratospheric approval ratings in his execution of the war on terrorism, President Bush now appears to be milking the “terror cow” for what it’s worth! At least one got that impression after listening to the President touch briefly on a few domestic issues in the middle of his speech, while devoting most of his attention to the “state of the world”!

One would like to give kudos to the President’s speechwriters for coming up with a quotable gem like “axis of evil”. However, one must wonder if the President and his advisors have really considered all the implications of engaging such a disparate axis in protracted, simultaneous, and geographically dispersed wars, if it became necessary? Are we ready to walk that talk?

More than fours years later, it has become quite apparent that we are in the midst of the very situation that I had warned about and President Bush’s responses thus far have more or less proven that he is unable to “walk that talk”. The whole world has had a good laugh at the expense of the despot, Kim Jong Il who insists on being referred to as “Dear Leader” by his people. Ironically, it is “we the people” of the United States who elected our very own “Fear Leader” – he, who intended to strike fear among the hearts of all the world’s evil dictators with his post-9/11 policies, but in reality has managed to largely scare his own citizenry with conveniently-timed reminders of how these evil dictators are out to harm America.

Not surprisingly the domestic fear-mongering is wearing thin and even neo-conservatives who fashioned the original Bush Doctrine are beginning to wonder, in the light of the current crises, whether the President has the will to see it through. Already former Speaker and 2008 presidential contender, Newt Gingrich is talking about “World War III” and other pundits have compared the current turmoil similar to the one that sparked World War I. Given these dire pronouncements, it might be time for President Bush to stop, not only leading with fear but also fearing to lead – his presidency, his legacy, and most importantly our status as the world’s only remaining superpower is at stake.

Family Ties Redux

2006-06-17T19:21:00.000-04:00

What better time to reminisce about a great sitcom from the eighties than on Father’s Day – which happens to be tomorrow – after all, 'Steven Keaton' was ranked #12 in TV Guide's list of the "50 Greatest TV Dads of All Time" (20 June 2004 issue). But this is not only about me. While I confess to being moderately liberal, my own parents ensured that I never experimented with the hippie thing. Although this might sound unbelievable, I did have friends in 1970s Bombay who went that route! So what sparked my trip down memory lane?

My son, Jay (Alex P. Keaton), just completed his sophomore year at the University of Maryland, College Park – where he intends to graduate with a major in Finance. Jay opened his own Scottrade account this year, recently took up golf, and is interning at a prominent DC investment banking firm this summer. Meanwhile, my daughter, Pia (Mallory Keaton), just finished her sophomore year in the Magnet Program at Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring. She will be interning this summer as a congressional page for Representative Albert D. Wynn (D-MD) from our home district.

What does this have to do with the ties that bind? Jay recently wrote a blog, “Two Minute Bush Quiz”, in which he asked his readers to partake in The George W. Bush Loyalty Quiz. I was surprised, but not alarmed, to find that Jay rated our President a 6 on a 10 scale. As the author of the “The Bush Diaries”, I was naturally keen on my evaluation of the President through this wacky poll. Not unexpectedly, I ranked the Decider a 4 out of 10 which, given my already published account of the President’s dismal job performance, appeared to be a fair reckoning. But then along came our Mallory (Pia), and she low-balled the President with a 2 ranking on the same quiz! That’s when I had this Family Ties epiphany – and with apologies to Billy Vera & the Beaters for a slightly distorted version of their classic “At This Moment” – along the lines of which, I offer this confession:

What did you think I would say at this moment?
When I'm faced with the knowledge
That I have a son who might be a Republican
And a daughter who is a bleeding heart liberal
I guess that puts me right in the middle
If I just could live with it

If I could just live with it, again

Happy Father’s Day, folks!

The Coincidental Pundit – my literal 15 minutes!

2006-05-20T16:01:00.000-04:00

My book “The Bush Diaries” was published back in July 2005. As a self-published author, who also holds a day job, I have had no opportunity so far to market or promote it. But recently, I was referred by a friend to the producers of a local TV program – Darshan TV – which caters to the Indian-American community. I was interviewed by Darshan TV host, Ramesh Butani, about my book for the program’s “In Conversation” segment, which aired today.

After watching my own TV debut, I happened to be reading today’s New York Times editorial page – lo and behold, John Tierney has a column entitled, “The People's Pundit”. Folks, it doesn’t get any more surreal than this because Mr. Tierney writes:

“His performance made it clear that television networks have been wasting money on professional commentators. Why not give everyone their 15 minutes of punditry? The only preparation the masses need is a video of Goma's debut”

If you watch my video debut with Mr. Butani, all you need to do is replace “Goma” with “Jack” and I am good to go. In fact, I do make an appeal to all the Sunday morning talk show hosts at the end of my Darshan TV interview – which believe it or not is exactly 15 minutes long! Andy Warhol must surely be chuckling up there? But seriously – Bob, George, Mike, and Tim – if you want to disprove this whole fifteen minute thing, give me a call!

With apologies to the Beatles, we are – Back in the USSR!

2006-05-13T15:31:00.000-04:00

Welcome to the new USSR – the United States of Spying & Reconnaissance. George Bush’s 2006 makes George Orwell’s 1984 really look like “Morning in America”. Shame on AT&T and Verizon for turning over my phone records to Big Brother – I wish Qwest offered service in Maryland because I would switch faster than Patrick Henry could have said “Give Me Liberty Or Give Me Death”. Henceforth, we all should no longer feel “Orwellian”; Americans must simply feel “AmBushed”.

Speaking of ambushed, we cannot afford to have Bush fatigue set in on us with another 32 months – yes, that is one month for each point of the President’s current approval rating per CNN – left to go in this presidency. Although, it can be rather disheartening when the President himself admits, as reported by Reuters last Sunday that the best moment he has had in his last five years in office was when:

“I caught a 7.5 pound (3.402 kilos) perch in my lake”.

Last night on his HBO show “Real Time with Bill Maher”, the comedian challenged that assertion saying that the largest perch ever caught in the history of fishing has weighed in at a little over four pounds. So Bill facetiously suggested that the President Bush should be impeached for lying! As the other Bill might have said in a situation as awkward as this, “It depends on the meaning of the word ‘caught’”.

However, I wouldn’t want to get all “caught” up on a little white lie and try to take away from the President what was after all, by his own admission, the best moment of his presidency so far. I am more perturbed by the constant erosion in our liberties during the course of this Administration – this is one mission that we, as Americans, cannot let the President accomplish. That the President is willing to curtail our freedom in order to guarantee it is an oxymoronic policy, which is in gross violation of our Constitution and needs to stop. With apologies to my favorite Beatles, I would rather be “Back in the US, Back in the US” but never “Back in the USSR”. So enough already with all the spying and reconnaissance, Mr. President.

Seinfeld Option on Iran and Biden-Gelb (+Six Neighbors) Plan for Iraq

2006-05-06T20:09:00.000-04:00

The latest AP-Ipsos poll finds that “Angry conservatives are driving the approval ratings of President Bush and the GOP-led Congress to dismal new lows”. It suggests to me that even the "war on terror" is taking a back seat to $3/gallon gas for the party faithful. I find this amusing only because all manner of conservative pundits have been singing of the same "law of supply and demand" song sheet after gas broke the $3/gallon milestone again last month for the first time since Hurricane Katrina – only this time around there were no natural disasters to blame! In fact, in the April 28th edition of The Washington Post, neocon pundit Charles Krauthammer head-lined his column “Say It With Me: Supply and Demand”. However, I strongly believe the reasons that we are paying $3/gallon at the pump has more to do with our foreign policy of the past few years than as much to do with the laws of a dismal science.

On the demand side, we cannot do much in the short-term to influence China and India from “gobbling huge amounts of energy” as Mr. Krauthammer calls it. But then the Bush Administration could do far more to curb our own insatiable domestic demand in the short-term – something that Mr. Krauthammer chose not to address despite waxing nostalgic about how we did the very same thing back in the seventies? On the supply side, Mr. Krauthammer is surprisingly silent on the Bush Administration’s current (Iraq) and perceived (Iran) casus belli that is contributing to the steep hike in the price of oil. He offers the perennial long-term conservative answer in “the missing supply of might-have-been American crude” from the “Arctic and outer continental shelf”. I would dare suggest that more immediate changes in our foreign policy could bring about an equally rapid decline in oil prices in short order.

Only a couple of days prior to Mr. Krauthammer’s lesson in macroeconomics, President Bush had announced his decision to tinker with the "supply side" of the oil equation. A front-page story in the April 26th edition of the Post reported:

“Amid growing Republican unrest about the politics of $3-plus gasoline, Bush told the Renewable Fuels Association he will take the unusual step of suspending shipments to the nation's Strategic Petroleum Reserve to boost supply and help hold down oil prices.”

Ironically, in September 2000, Governor Bush had said the following at a presidential campaign stop in Cleveland, and I quote him from the CNN archive:

“Strategic Reserve should not be used as an attempt to drive down oil prices right before an election. It should not be used for short-term political gain at the cost of long-term national security.”

I think it is foolhardy for the President to expect that, by skipping a few deposits into a reserve that is nearly full, he is going to make any immediate difference to the price of gas at the pump. Although, it could make a difference if he decided to open the spigot to the tune of one million barrels a day every day from Memorial Day to Labor Day? But then he would only be further guilty of fueling our “addiction to oil” – a belated conclusion that he had arrived at in his 2006 State of the Union speech, when he pontificated:

“America is addicted to oil, which is often imported from unstable parts of the world.”

One would imagine that if we are importing this “drug” from “unstable parts of the world”, we should either wean ourselves off the drug or try to stabilize parts of the world from where we get it? In the past five years President Bush has not offered any serious rehab program to wean American motorists off their oil addiction. More distressingly, his foreign policy initiatives have only further “destabilized” parts of the world (Middle East, Venezuela) from where we import our oil.

In an interesting theory, New York Times columnist, Thomas L. Friedman postulates in his May 5th column that there is a direct correlation between rising energy prices and the decline of democracy in, what he calls “petro-ist” states. I would take his theory one step further and suggest that the United States has had a decline in its bilateral relationships with each one of these petro-ist states throughout the Bush presidency. So I would posit that instead of the price of oil, it should be the larger Bush foreign policy – that has brought about this precipitous decline in our bilateral relationships with many of these petro-ist states – that needs to become, what Mr. Friedman refers to as “a daily preoccupation of the secretary of state”. A less confrontational foreign policy would bring about an upsurge in our bilateral relationships with several of these petro-ist states, which in turn would result in a dramatic and faster drop in the price of oil.

With regards to petro-ist Iran, the Wall Street Journal came up short in its April 21st editorial, “Bush and Iran”. They reiterated our long-standing problem with Iran but offered no solutions – something that they have been critical about with the “Bush and Iraq” critics? Unfortunately, the river of bad blood between Iran and the U.S. has been flowing for far too long and far too deep to offer any hope for a serious breakthrough via bilateral negotiations. Unless President Bush can get the international community to agree to prolonged and comprehensive sanctions enforced by a complete land, air, and sea blockade of Iran – he might as well get used to a nuclear Iran, just as he has become accustomed to a nuclear North Korea.

With regards to petro-ist Iraq, Senator Joseph Biden and Leslie H. Gelb (President Emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations) recently proposed a very reasonable plan in an op-ed in The New York Times. Most of the Biden-Gelb plan for “Unity Through Autonomy in Iraq” makes a lot of sense. However, it did not take into consideration one very important geo-political consideration that is critical to the plan’s success – Iraq’s neighbors. When Saddam was in power he was a constant threat to his neighbors. Once the United States withdraws and with no unifying authoritarian figure in control of Iraq, its neighbors will become a threat to its unity. We cannot forget that Iraq was a country created by the British from disparate nomadic regions. The Turks have had historical issues with the Kurds and Iran will continue to become increasingly influential and meddlesome with the autonomous Shia portion of Iraq. So we need to involve all of Iraq’s neighbors ¬– Iran, Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Turkey – upfront in a Dayton-type round of discussions to ensure that the Biden-Gelb plan is destined to succeed.

Conclusion: The Bush Administration must ignore Iran for the rest of its term (I call this the Seinfeld option – “Do Nothing”), as it has ignored North Korea (since the start of the second term), and also immediately initiate another “six-countries” round of talks on implementing the Biden-Gelb plan for Iraq. If President Bush immediately executes the Seinfeld option on Iran and Biden-Gelb (+Six Neighbors) Plan for Iraq, I am confident that we will see crude oil prices sink below $50 a barrel and domestic gas at the pump under $2/gallon by the fall! More importantly, we will witness a more stable Middle East and a concomitant increase in our standing in the world.

Crossing the Persian Gulf

2006-04-23T00:28:00.000-04:00

When I spent four months in Doha, Qatar back in 1981 I was advised not to refer to the ocean surrounding the mostly Arab states as the “Persian Gulf”. Apparently, letters from home would arrive in a more timely fashion if the last line of my Doha address read “Arabian Gulf”. In those days, when Arab Iraq was in the first year of its eight year war with Persian Iran, Arab pride was literally causing a big gulf between Muslim nations of the Middle East.

How times have changed? President Bush’s “war on terror” is now rapidly bridging the divide between these disparate Muslim countries. In fact, after we toppled Saddam Hussein, Iran began to accelerate its nuclear program. The leadership in Iran has recently started to get nostalgic about its ancient Persian heritage. We have learned that Saddam Hussein had dreams of becoming a modern-day Saladin. We shouldn’t be too surprised then, if Iranian President Ahmadinejad soon adopts the mantle of Cyrus the Great? In order to earn that sort of reverence from the Iranian people, Ahmadinejad feels the need to acquire the power, prestige, and protection afforded by nuclear weapons.

Sadly, Iran’s determination to proceed along this nuclear path presents a dangerous dilemma to the western world in general and the U.S. in particular. In his April 19th New York Times column, Thomas L. Friedman said it offered us a stark choice between “Iraq II or a Nuclear Iran?” Unfortunately, this is a Hobson's choice. Nonetheless, we might be forced to pick the lesser of two evils for now – a Nuclear Iran? Iraq I established the failure of the much vaunted Bush Doctrine and the inefficacy of preemption. In fact, it produced the opposite effect, which was to increase the belligerence of the “axis of evil” nations. So it’s unlikely that any carrot-and-stick policy attempted by the Bush Administration with Iran is likely to produce any meaningful change in Iran’s behavior. It might be best to put Iran on ice for the next 33 months and let the next President start with a clean slate. In the meanwhile, the Bush Administration should focus on getting Iraq I right – that might even have a causal effect on Iran?

Speaking of getting Iraq I right, I was surprised to read Friday’s Wall Street Journal editorial, “Bush and Iran”. The WSJ editors were apparently not practicing what they often preach to the “Bush and Iraq” critics. Their lengthy dissertation on “Bush and Iran” reiterated the complexity of the problem but offered no solution beyond:

“the President must begin to educate the American public about what is at stake in Iran and what the U.S. might be prepared to do about it.”

Excuse me? The “gulf” between Iran and the U.S. has become so wide and so deep over so long a period, it is unlikely that a majority of the American public is not already aware of the threat that a nuclear Iran poses to the United States. As far as Iran’s nuclear program is concerned, unless we can get the international community to agree to prolonged and comprehensive sanctions enforced by a complete land, air, and sea blockade of Iran – we might as well get used to a nuclear Iran, just as we have become accustomed to a nuclear North Korea.

If we are ever going to cross the Persian abyss, preemption is not an option and meaningless threats must stop at the water’s edge. If President Bush is really serious about making headway with Persia before he leaves office, he could appoint President Clinton as a special envoy to head bilateral negotiations between Iran and the U.S. - with carte blanche authority to bridge the gulf between our two nations!

Kissing Up to India

2006-04-01T15:27:00.000-05:00

It looks like Nixon White House counselor John Dean is now seeing a cancer growing on the Bush presidency. At the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing yesterday on President Bush’s warrantless eavesdropping, the Watergate icon suggested, “Hopefully the Senate will not sit by while even more serious abuses unfold before it.” Ouch!

While Bush is certainly unlike Nixon on domestic policy, they do seem to have some similarities on the foreign policy front and I am not talking about the Vietnam-Iraq comparisons that have been made almost from the start of the Iraq war. It’s their shared obsession with Pakistani dictators that confounds me.

Some political pundits have compared Bush’s recent trip to India with Nixon’s groundbreaking visit to China in 1972. However, back then Nixon wanted to befriend China as a counter to the Soviet Union, which happened to be cozying up to India. Nixon thus also chose Pakistan over India and, as the BBC reported last June, “developed a ‘special relationship’ with Pakistan's then military dictator, General Yahya Khan.”

Official documents released last year from that era also reveal a strong personal distaste that both, Nixon and Kissinger had for Indians in general. Here is another snippet from that same BBC News story:

One key conversation transcript comes from the meeting between President Nixon and Mr. Kissinger in the White House on 5 November 1971, shortly after a meeting with the visiting Indira Gandhi.

“We really slobbered over the old witch,” says President Nixon.

“The Indians are bastards anyway,” says Mr. Kissinger.

Ouch! As a first generation Indian-American that revelation stung me. Kissinger is revered like a foreign policy god, but I remember him being flummoxed by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s diplomatic panache and political skills during the Bangladesh crisis. The same “old witch” ran circles around Kissinger back then as he desperately tried to save Pakistan from humiliation and inhibit the creation of Bangladesh.

Nevertheless, Nixon did make a stark choice – he clearly preferred Pakistan’s military dictatorship to India’s then fledgling democracy. In contrast, President Bush appears to be hedging his bets on the subcontinent – opting for a new strategic relationship with India while continuing to coddle yet another Pakistani military dictator, General Musharraf. This wily leader manages to simultaneously “talk the talk” about Pakistan’s assistance to the United States in its “war on terror”, while he continues to hedge his bets on the future of the Taliban. One can’t imagine that Bush and Condi Rice are naïve enough not to recognize this transparent behavior. I can almost visualize a post-9/11 White House conversation transcript being released in 2025 that reads as follows:

“We really slobbered over that two-timing armchair general,” President Bush remarks.

“The Pakistanis are idiots anyway,” Condi Rice adds.

Ouch! In any event, after 9/11 President Bush probably recognized that it would be impossible for the western world to contain, what Jimmy Carter recently referred to as, a “Pandora’s box of nuclear proliferation” already in progress. Bush found out that this box had been blown open by Pakistan several years prior to 9/11, when their top nuclear scientist, A.Q. Khan, began selling nuclear technology to Iran, Libya, and North Korea. In fact, this Pandora’s Box had actually begun a slow leak after the Soviet Union collapsed at the end of the Cold War.

By negotiating what President Carter called in the same Post article a “dangerous deal with India”, President Bush is strategically trying to rope in a growing economic and nuclear power on to the Judeo-Christian side of what is quite clearly becoming a political divide along religious lines. Also, it is highly unpredictable as to which side of this religious fault line the old “evil empire” and the remnants of the communist world will come out in the long term. I would therefore counter that not consummating Bush’s nuclear deal with India would be dangerous to the lasting interests of the United States.

Not surprisingly then Georgia Democrat Sam Nunn, co-chairman and chief executive of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, also believes that Bush’s nuclear deal with India would harm the “United States' vital interest” in preventing nuclear proliferation. Surely Senator Nunn must recognize that India has lived without US civilian nuclear technology for over thirty years. There is no reason, aside from its burgeoning energy needs, that India would have a need for US nuclear power reactors. Irrespective of the outcome of this deal, India will continue to honor the principle of nuclear non-proliferation without being an actual signatory to the NPT.

The United States has a lot more to lose from a business and global security standpoint than India, if this deal were not consummated. I would much rather see my native country dependent on the US, than either Iran or Russia, for its long term energy needs. Besides, with the US economy increasingly reliant on communist China, a diversification in our strategic relationships portfolio is long overdue. The new US-India relationship could well turn out to be the only significant foreign policy achievement of the Bush presidency.

So while prominent Democrats are trying to put the kibosh on President Bush’s nuclear deal with India, some renowned Republicans are supporting it. After Dr. Henry A. Kissinger’s old anti-Indian sentiments were exposed last year, he quickly apologized for branding all Indians with a broad brush in such harsh terms. His bona fides were further established recently in an article entitled, "Anatomy of a partnership” that appeared in the International Herald Tribune on March 10, 2006. In a strong endorsement of President Bush’s India policy, the man who once doubted the legitimacy of my birth concluded:

In a period preoccupied with concerns over terrorism and the potential clash of civilizations, the emerging cooperation between the two great democracies, India and the United States, introduces a positive and hopeful perspective.

As the old saying goes “from your lips to God’s ears” – kissing up never felt sweeter – Amen!

Return of the King – an Exit from Iraq

2006-03-11T00:12:00.000-05:00

In his March 2nd column in The Washington Post, George Will quoted President Bush as having said, “Our strategy in Iraq is that the Iraqis stand up, we'll stand down.” Therein lies the problem because the President is confusing strategy with objective. Training Iraqi security forces has often been mentioned as a strategy to meet the President’s objective of getting Iraqis to “stand up”. But then our tactics to execute that strategy have not been very effective either, as we learned recently that the number of “combat-ready Iraqi brigades” had dropped from one to zero.

Mr. Will also quoted Winston Churchill’s dire warning to Britons in 1940 that “Wars are not won by evacuations.” There is no way anyone, Americans or Iraqis, can win in Iraq by the evacuation of coalition forces at this point in time. Nonetheless, one hopes that we don’t have to witness “déjà vu all over again” – a helicopter airlift of Ambassador Khalilzad from the roof of our embassy in Baghdad in the near future. It’s more likely that a reminder of that infamous 1975 video from Saigon could force the Bush Administration away from what Mr. Will calls their “rhetoric of unreality”.

With the incessant media chatter about the likelihood of an impending civil war in Iraq, I was not the least surprised to read in yesterday’s New York Times about “The Conservative Epiphany”. In his column, Paul Krugman writes:

“Born-again Bush-bashers like Mr. Bartlett and Mr. Sullivan, however churlish, are intellectually and morally superior to the Bushist dead-enders who still insist that Saddam was allied with Al Qaeda, and will soon be claiming that we lost the war in Iraq because the liberal media stabbed the troops in the back. And reporters understandably consider it newsworthy that some conservative voices are now echoing longstanding liberal critiques of the Bush administration.”

Mr. Krugman concludes his liberal broadside with this incredulous question, “It's still fair, however, to ask people like Mr. Bartlett the obvious question: What took you so long?”

I would imagine the answer to that question is rather superfluous, since Mr. Bartlett is in the midst of peddling his new book, “Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy”. It didn’t take me any time at all because I have been critiquing Bush Administration policies in real time throughout the President’s first term. In fact, I was constantly haranguing the media for not doing its oversight job, a role which a supine Republican Congress pretty much abdicated after 9/11. You can read all about my lonely crusade in “The Bush Diaries: A Citizens Review of the First Term” published by iUniverse in July 2005.

Also in yesterday’s New York Times, Thomas Friedman ("Mr. Nasty, Brutish and Short-Tempered") came up with a great idea for resolving the impasse in Iraq. However, instead of Ambassador Khalilzad and Vice President Cheney playing a good cop-bad cop routine at what Mr. Friedman calls “a national reconciliation conference”, I think that the U.S. delegation should actually pull off a “bad cop-badder cop” number. Such a meeting would surely produce desired results if Dick “Darth Vader” Cheney brought Saddam “Lord Voldemort” Hussein along to the party. All Iraqi factions, including the Sunnis, would quickly get in line – if they realized that an imminent U.S. withdrawal could herald the return of the king?

In the past few months, Don Imus (host of “Imus in the Morning” radio program) and Chris Matthews (host of “The Chris Matthews Show” and “Hardball”) have been rather facetiously touting the return of Saddam Hussein as our exit strategy from Iraq. Well, I had promoted a similar idea, quite seriously, in a letter to the Post on April 25, 2004. This letter, in response to an article by Robin Wright entitled, “U.S. Moves to Rehire Some From Baath Party, Military” appears in my book, “The Bush Diaries” (pg. 162) and is reproduced below:

“After reading Robin Wright's report, one wonders if the U.S. administrator of Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, might extend his “re-Baathification” strategy to include a “humbled” Saddam Hussein at some point of time in the near future. Outrageous and heretical as this suggestion might seem, we might recall that during the 1980s Iran-Iraq war, the Reagan Administration not only supported Saddam Hussein but also supplied him with some of the raw materials for his chemical and biological programs. With the current situation in Iraq spiraling out of control, Mr. Bremer could conceivably seek the assistance of a “de-programmed” Saddam Hussein to restore law and order in the country? The Bush Administration could justify this action on several grounds:

• Without WMD, Saddam Hussein is no longer a threat to the United States or his neighbors
• Saddam Hussein is the only one who can prevent Iraq from breaking up into parts ala Yugoslavia
• Saddam Hussein is our best containment-cum-insurance policy against a virulent Iran
• Saddam Hussein was never aligned with Al Qaeda, which is our real enemy
• Re-Baathification, with Saddam Hussein back in the saddle, provides us the quickest, cleanest, and most inexpensive exit strategy out of Iraq

If one thinks this is a far-fetched scenario, which patriotic American would have believed even six months ago that we would resume business dealings with Libya's Moammar Gaddafi!”

This letter was written almost two years ago! The bitter truth is that it contains a strategy that might still work and is probably a more effective one than Thomas Friedman’s proposed shot gun approach with Dick Cheney.

Shot Gun Approach

2006-02-18T14:23:00.000-05:00

In his Post column “Quell Quailgate” dated February 17, 2006 Charles Krauthammer writes, “Something happened involving the vice president that was interesting and unusual but of no great significance beyond that.” I wish the rest of us could be as sanguine about this infamous shooting incident. Mr. Krauthammer concludes wistfully that “Cheney got a judgment call wrong” and that’s all there was to it.

However, Mr. Krauthammer must recall that this is the same vice president, who assured us three days prior to the start of the war that “we will be greeted as liberators” in Iraq. Over two years later, despite a still-raging insurgency in Iraq, Vice President Cheney famously declared it was “in the last throes”. One wonders how many more such Cheney judgment calls it will take, before other conservatives “get religion” as Peggy Noonan did a couple of days ago. Ms Noonan concluded in her Wall Street Journal op-ed column that

“Mr. Bush may feel in time that he has reason to want to put in a new vice president”.

Meanwhile on the liberal side of town Eugene Robinson erred only slightly, when he wrote in his Post column on Tuesday that “out-of-control is the way this whole administration operates: Ready, fire, aim.” I believe that it’s actually been more like: Fire, aim, not ready! We can’t forget that the Bush Administration took a shot gun approach into Iraq as well – in the misguided belief that their “shock and awe” strategy did not require a need to “aim”. Three years later, the Bush Administration has discovered that the American public is “not ready” for what they are now calling a “long war” in Iraq.

In fact, this friendly fire, shot gun approach has proven to be a metaphor for the Bush Administration’s handling of major domestic crises as well. Senior citizens have been peppered by a confusing array of options with the Administration’s new prescription drug plan – it’s apparent now that no one was ready for it. The hodge-podge of the Administration’s post-Katrina efforts included cash payments, hotel stays, extensions, evictions, vacant trailer lots, etc. – yet, almost six months later, New Orleans is still a mess and the new hurricane season is barely four months away.

Finally, a word about the vice president’s judgment in selecting Fox News to tell his side of the shooting story – Mr. Cheney was responsible for sending our soldiers into a war where they were hardly greeted as liberators, Mr. Cheney even shot a dear friend in the face, yet Mr. Cheney lacks the chutzpah to host a more open national press conference? With their record of warrantless surveillance, a Pravda-like reliance on Fox News, and a never-ending “war on terror” deteriorating into a modern day crusade – I am tempted to conclude with a Woodwardian warning “be afraid, be very afraid”. But instead, I can only hope that this “friendly fire” incident is a wake-up call to the larger American public. We can no longer be duped by this Administration’s trump card – crying wolf on "national security" whenever it’s convenient to mask its larger failings – that shot gun approach is only for the birds!

The Other Side of US Economic Policy

2006-02-11T14:20:00.000-05:00

The Bush Administration keeps touting the strength of the US economy, which in 2005 saw annual GDP growth of 3.5% and a 15% hike in federal revenues over 2004 to a record $2.15 trillion. In today’s Washington Post, Paul Blustein’s “Trade Gap Hits Record For 4th Year In a Row” tells only a part of the other side of this story – at what cost has this “economic success” been achieved?

The US trade deficit almost doubled from $370 billion in 2000 to $725 billion in 2005, while the national debt increased 44% from $5.7 trillion to $8.2 trillion during the same period. The US personal savings rate was -0.5% in 2005, which means that Americans spent more than they earned after taxes – this is the first time that this has happened since the Great Depression. According to the Chicago Tribune, “The savings rate has been negative for an entire year only twice before, in 1932 and 1933.” So not only is our government living beyond its means, now “we the people” are doing so too!

Meanwhile China continues to eat our lunch on the economic front. Recently the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reported, “China's economy grew by a red-hot 9.9 per cent in 2005, the Chinese government announced Wednesday – enough to overtake Britain as the fourth biggest economy in the world, after the U.S., Japan, and Germany.” However, as the CBC noted, “Exports surged 28.4 per cent to $878 billion and helped to lead China to record a trade surplus of almost $118 billion.” To make matters worse, Mr. Blustein points out in today’s Post article, “the mounting U.S. deficit with China, which rose 24.5 percent to $201.6 billion last year, the biggest gap the United States has ever posted with a single country.”

If only that were all we had to worry about – Peter S. Goodman of The Washington Post had warned last month that China’s “foreign currency reserves swelled by more than one-third last year to a record $819 billion”. Mr. Goodman also notes that “Traditionally, China has sunk three-fourths of its reserves into U.S.-dollar-denominated investments, such as U.S. Treasury bills.” Is there any doubt as to how easy it has become for China to adversely impact US monetary policy? Never mind, how increasingly difficult it has become for the US to convince China to allow its currency to float!

Finally, we have all heard of the saying, “Like father, like son”. In the geopolitical context, this can be interpreted to mean, “Like nation, like people”. The day after Mr. Goodman’s story appeared in the Post, the Chinese Embassy in the US put out a news release stating “The country had a record 14 trillion yuan (US$1.7 trillion) in personal savings by the end of 2005”.

Candidate Bush had campaigned in 2000 that he would treat China as a “strategic competitor” and not as a “strategic partner” – which is the way he claimed then that President Clinton had dealt with China throughout his presidency. Ironically, President Bush’s own economic policy has now pretty much tied up his hands and severely limited his options in effecting any dramatic change in the overall nature of our relationship with China. It’s the other side of US economic policy that the Bush Administration never talks about!

A Tale of Two Cities — the Big Easy and the Huge Messy — Will Define the Bush Legacy

2005-09-17T14:51:00.000-04:00

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us…"
— Charles Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities”

In the immediate aftermath of Katrina – as the world learned that it was largely the poor and the destitute that got left behind in New Orleans – The Washington Post reported, “The poverty rate climbed in 2004 to 12.7 percent, from 12.5 percent in 2003 -- the fourth year in a row that poverty has risen.” After falling throughout the Clinton presidency, from a ten-year high of 15.1% in 1993 to a 27-year low of 11.3% in 2000, the poverty rate resumed its upward march during President George W. Bush’s first term. This climb has been analogous to the hike in the poverty rate through much of his father’s term (1990-92), which had then followed a near identical (to Clinton) slide in the poverty rate during the Reagan “seven fat years (1983-89)”. Coincidentally, Hurricane Andrew, which devastated the southern Florida peninsula and south-central Louisiana in 1992, had been the most expensive natural disaster in United States history prior to Hurricane Katrina. It would seem to me that the Bush Karma, which I wrote about in my recent book, “The Bush Diaries”, continues to dog this presidency.

As the President now simultaneously grapples with the myriad problems of having to manage a war abroad and a crisis of gargantuan proportions at home, he might want to come to terms with the implications of this biblical prophecy:

“Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” – Galatians 6:7

In the light of the Bush Administration’s dismal performance in the wake of Katrina, whose progress had been closely monitored and whose after-effects had been widely anticipated, it’s only logical that a majority of American citizens are expressing “shock and awe” at the gross incompetence of the Bush Administration. It might have taken President Bush seven long minutes to get off his chair in that Florida elementary school after being informed about a second plane hitting the World Trade Center, but this time around it took him closer to 7000 minutes after Katrina had made landfall to finally show up in New Orleans!

It’s quite apparent, from his recent televised address to the nation from the Big Easy, that President Bush has realized that his legacy is going to be determined by the "tale of two cities": Baghdad and New Orleans. By the end of his second term, he will have likely spent upwards of $200 billion each in the reconstruction of Iraq and the U.S. Gulf states. We all know that he, and the indomitable American spirit, will succeed in restoring the Big Easy—because throughout history Man has eventually prevailed over Nature's wrath. The more questionable outcome is going to be in the Huge Messy—will President Bush succeed in rebuilding Iraq and be able to leave it with a functioning government and an orderly society—since recovery from this disaster, one largely of his own making, is highly unpredictable. I suspect that 9/11 and the tale of those two other “Bush Doctrine-bestowing” cities, New York and Washington, will fade into the background as far as the ultimate Bush legacy is concerned—and for this the President has only himself to blame!

Desperate Maladies Require Desperate Remedies

2005-08-03T14:14:00.000-04:00

At the outset, I must confess that I have not read Jhumpa Lahiri’s 1999 best seller, “Interpreter of Maladies”. Nonetheless, I have an interpretation for western civilization’s post-9/11 maladies that might not be palatable to its civil libertarians. Following the 7/7 and 7/21 suicide bomber attacks in London, it has become apparent that western civilization is being threatened in a way that demands any proposed remedies to be equally extreme. In the war on terrorism, Europe is fast approaching a point—which we have probably already breached in America—where freedom can no longer be considered a right but a privilege for its troublesome few. In this regard, any political solution would necessarily have to increase its focus on the wayward children of first generation immigrants in western societies.

In support of my desperate remedies reasoning, I recall a Bollywood movie from my days as a youth in India. In the movie an Indian soldier of a minority faith is faced with a classical dilemma when he needs to choose between the apparently conflicting demands of his religion and the pressing needs of his country? I remember billboards around Bombay asking ordinary citizens to vote on the matter prior to the movie’s release. Not surprisingly, the movie producers claimed that over 75% of the citizens chose country over religion! This Bollywood movie exemplifies the predicament faced by some first generation immigrants in western societies today. Given its poor record of assimilating its immigrant population, Western Europe shouldn’t be shocked to find out that a few of its first generation immigrants probably put the demands of their faith before the interests of their adopted country, which could be at cross-purposes at times.

Based on the initial reports from the 7/7 investigations, it seems that Britain’s first generation immigrant parents did not have a clue as to the terrorist proclivities of their progeny. Well, then it is about time Britain tested its “meet the parents” hypothesis. Some British children, of first generation immigrant parents, might not give a hoot about the country adopted by their mothers and fathers. However, if these misguided souls are religious fanatics, they surely must care a lot about the welfare of their diligent parents. After all, their parents did leave their native land to ensure that these ingrates lived a better life in Britain. Thus, my tough love proposal calls on Britain to pass a law that would seek the deportation of first generation parents of these suicide bombers back to their native countries.

The assumption here—while these suicide bombers might place their religion above the adopted country of their parents, they surely cannot love their religion more than their own parents—is a culturally accepted one. It’s high time that these misguided youth were made to realize that their foolish actions will force their parents to "inherit" punitive consequences. No longer will the planned murders of innocent patrons of mass transit systems go unpunished. Henceforth, these selfish and cowardly acts will additionally penalize the parents of these second generation suicide bombers. This will become a case of the sins of the children being visited upon their parents, which amounts to a rather harsh judgment in some cultures. I don’t write this lightly—my wife and I are both first-generation immigrant citizens of the United States, and we constantly pray that we have brought up our children to lead responsible, law-abiding lives in the country that we love and have adopted as our home. I hope that the deportation law that I have proposed will go a long way in stopping the madness—of this random killing of innocents by ungrateful children, who just happen to be citizens of civilized western societies only due to the accident of their birth!

PRESIDENCY AND PUNDITRY UNPLUGGED

2005-07-21T00:00:00.000-04:00

THE BUSH DIARIES: A Citizen’s Review of the First Term
Jack Nargundkar

(Germantown, MD, July 21, 2005)— 7/7 has put President Bush’s oft-repeated claim—“We will fight the terrorists abroad so we do not have to face them here at home” —on notice. While announcing the release today of his first book, The Bush Diaries, author Jack Nargundkar echoed a growing American sentiment relating to the efficacy of this policy in stopping homegrown terrorists:

“I suspect that both, a botched implementation of the Bush Doctrine and the media’s pre-Iraq war complacency, are responsible for our current quandary, which keeps us all in a state of perpetual anxiety with respect to our way of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness! This isn’t the way it was supposed to be?”

In The Bush Diaries, Jack Nargundkar recommends that the United States commit to two critical Cs in our foreign relations, especially when it comes to Muslim nations. A foreign policy that reflects our core values and one that is applied consistently; but one that forsakes convenience by refusing to make policy exceptions for allied countries with values that are antithetical to our own.

On the evolving Iran-Iraq relationship, Jack Nargundkar writes in The Bush Diaries,

“I think that Shia hegemony as a counter-balance to Sunni Arab supremacy—if allowed to proceed as a natural evolution of the new realpolitik in the Middle East—could benefit us in the long-term, without the need for another preemptive war in the short-term.”

In The Bush Diaries, Jack Nargundkar kept tabs on what the political pundits—at The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times—had to say about the President’s policies and responded to them in real time. Some of his opinions were published by each one of these prestigious newspapers. The key difference between The Bush Diaries and other books on President Bush: Jack Nargundkar comments not only on the performance of the President, but he also critiques the media pundits who evaluate the presidency.

Jack Nargundkar has spent over 20 years as a marketing professional in the global software and telecommunications industries. As a first generation Indian-American, Jack Nargundkar brings a unique perspective to U.S. economic and foreign policy. An Executive Education Fellow at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business, Jack Nargundkar has a BSEE from Bombay University and an MBA from Columbia Business School in New York City.

THE BUSH DIARIES: A Citizen’s Review of the First Term
290 pp, $19.95
ISBN: 0-595-35898-5
Author: Jack Nargundkar
Publisher: iUniverse
Publication Date: July 2005
Available From: Ingram Book Group, Baker & Taylor, and iUniverse
To order: call 1-800-AUTHORS or go online at any of the following:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0595358985/qid=1123084435/sr=1-3/ref=sr_1_3/102-5718978-7163300?v=glance&s=books

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=Xy63I1dBQR&isbn=0595358985&itm=3

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Media Contact:
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Throttling the Supply Side Spin

2005-07-15T17:04:00.000-04:00

At the outset, I have to praise The Wall Street Journal editorial page for reproducing a graph that can actually be interpreted in a bipartisan manner. I refer, of course, to their cocky editorial entitled, "Windfall for Washington" in today’s paper. While gloating over this year’s "revenue surge from investment income", they also

"thank heaven for the tax cuts that have helped to spur the economy that is now throwing off higher tax revenues. As the chart shows, those revenues are now rising back to their modern average as a share of GDP, just as supporters of the tax cuts predicted."

Here is the wonderful chart—which exemplifies the meaning of the phrase "a picture is better than a thousand words"—that they refer to:

Now, as far as my eye can see, revenue receipts per this chart have been over the 40-year historical average of 18.2% in only two sustained periods: 1980-82 and 1994-2001. As readers will recall, the Reagan tax cuts first went into effect in 1981 and then again in 1986. This graph clearly shows that revenue receipts, except for minor blips in 1987 and 1989, were below the 40-year historical average not only through the "seven fat years (1983-1989)" of the Reagan presidency, but also through the three lean years (1990-92) of Bush 41. Revenue receipts then began their climb over the 40-year historical average in the "seven fat years (1994-2001)" of the Clinton presidency. After the "trifecta" of 2001—recession, Bush 43’s first tax cuts, and 9/11—hit the U.S. economy, revenue receipts plunged sharply below the 40-year historical average through the remaining three years (2002-2004) of the Bush 43 first term!

These facts are there for the naked eye to see—we have been bitten twice by the supply side bug in the past 25 years, without sustained revenue rebounds. For readers that might be interested, I have presented more empirical data on this subject in my new book, "The Bush Diaries", which is being published by iUniverse next month. Notwithstanding this year’s upward surge in revenues and OMB’s optimistic estimate through 2010, I would wait at least another couple of years before celebrating any "Windfall for Washington".

London - At Sixes and Sevens

2005-07-08T23:09:00.000-04:00

Jolly old London gave new meaning to a typical English phrase, “at sixes and sevens”, when a string of bombs went off in the heart of the city the day after it had been selected as the venue for the 2012 Olympics. Brits were truly at sixes and sevens – on the sixth, they were in seventh heaven after London trumped Paris to become the host city for the 2012 Olympics, but the very next day, on the seventh, their euphoria was abruptly deep-sixed by the bombings.

Back home newspaper editorials were spinning this tragedy in line with their respective ideologies. Thus, in my left hand, The New York Times wondered “why the wealthy nations have not done enough about the root causes of terrorism and why Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden continue to function after almost four years of the so-called war on terrorism.” While, in my right hand, The Wall Street Journal suggested that “retreat from battling the Islamists in the Middle East would only make it easier for them to take the battle to us at home, as they did yesterday in London.”

Nevertheless, it was Tunku Varadarajan, editorial features editor of The Wall Street Journal, who nailed the British character for what it is in an apolitical tribute. In the Weekend Journal’s De Gustibus column entitled, “The Sign Says 'Take Courage' and the Brits Do”, Mr. Varadarajan wrote:

It really is considered unseemly to complain, or to feel sorry for oneself, among Britons: This aversion to self-pity is bad for the terrorists, who thrive on attention and the sowing of chaos. They won’t get much satisfaction in Britain. Londoners will not retreat into their shells, and they are unlikely to do as the Spaniards did and draw out the tragedy with a lot of public recrimination, or to capitulate in any way.

The secret of British composure is that Britons really do feel proud of their civilization. On the whole, they apologize for very little, which is as it should be. Their message to terrorists is always likely to be straight and robust: “How dare you! I'm British!”

So I suspect that the sixes and sevens are not going to last for very long and our dear friends across the pond will collectively pick themselves up, dust off their jacket, stick their chest out, put their chin up, and show those damn cowards how civilized people behave. As for me, the next time I am in London, I am going to use the Underground as usual – but to the first gent that I bump into on the tube, I will proffer, “Mr. Livingstone, I presume.”

"The Bush Diaries" — Unmasking the President’s Performance

2005-06-18T12:27:00.000-04:00

If you enjoy reading the posts on this blog, you are going to love the revelations in my new book entitled, “The Bush Diaries: A Citizen’s Review of the First Term”, which is due to be released later this summer. The Bush Diaries tracks the performance of President George W. Bush and attendant media pundits throughout his tumultuous first term.

In the past couple of years, I kept tabs on what the political pundits — at The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times — had to say about the President’s policies and responded to them in real time. Some of my opinions even got published by each one of these prestigious newspapers. The key difference between my book and others that you might have read on President Bush: I comment not only on the performance of the President, but I also critique the media pundits who evaluate the presidency. In fact, The Bush Diaries has a few “Great Moments in Punditry” that would make aficionados of “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” proud. However, my only caveat being there is nothing fake about the news in my book.

The Bush Diaries is a compendium of various letters — to the editors of the aforementioned newspapers — that I wrote during the second half of Bush’s first term. Other contemporaneous articles that I had written earlier on the President’s economic and foreign policies cover the first half of his term. In developing the book, I organized my articles and letters in a chronological order and then inserted a current preface to each one of them, so that the entire narrative reads like a running commentary on the Bush presidency.

It is important to keep the Bush Administration’s “past actions” in mind (for example, their machinations prior to the Iraq War), while contemplating support for likely “future events” (e.g. dealing with the crises in Iran and North Korea). I took the liberty of offering suggestions and making recommendations on a number of economic and foreign policy issues, which I believe will impact the President’s second term.

The Bush Diaries offers a simple foreign policy message to the President — stick with those comfortable Cs in dealing with other countries, especially in the Muslim world — our foreign policy should reflect our core values, it should be applied consistently, and the President should forsake convenience by refusing to make policy exceptions for allied countries with values that are antithetical to ours.

On the domestic policy front, I recommend that the President needs to seriously work on his Ds and Es, and drop those polarizing Gs. Thus, the President has to first and foremost deal with the troublesome Ds — by reducing the massive budget and trade deficits, and by boosting the value of the dollar. He simultaneously needs to work with both parties in Congress to reach a consensus on the critical Es — education, the environment, and energy policy. Finally, the President must stop politicizing those infamous Gs — god, guns, and gays — the election is over, he won, and it’s time to show some grace!

The Bush Diaries is being published by iUniverse and will be available online at www.amazon.com just in time to round off this great summer.

Without Mark Felt "our long national nightmare" would be still going on!

2005-06-02T22:23:00.000-04:00

Watergate was a criminal conspiracy, exposed in large part by The Washington Post, which brought down a Republican president. Whitewater was a shady deal, conflated to some extent by the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal, which unfairly tormented a Democratic president. So when the WSJ editorial page compares the two in “Deep Throat's Legacy”, the only commonality that I see is the “water” part. While the Watergate investigation opened the floodgates to expose real corruption, the Whitewater probe closed the dikes due to a drought of valid information. The WSJ editors conclude that “the Fourth Estate's first duty is to report the facts” — advice that they should have followed back in the 1990s when they were obsessing over Whitewater. By continuously churning Whitewater, they managed to create a lot of turbulence and no dirt really settled. Per the old adage, they should have known that “still waters run deep”.

Speaking of deep, Washington has been agog in the past couple of days with the outing of “Deep Throat” after 33 years under cover. This is a truly remarkable story in a number of ways, since it highlights:

* The irony of Woodward and Bernstein preserving a secret for three decades in a town that they seduced for gobs of information over three tumultuous years (1972-74) to unravel a corrupt presidency. Undoubtedly, along with Ben Bradlee, they have helped restore some integrity to journalism, which has taken a pounding in the past few years with the problems at The New York Times and USA Today.

* The dilemma for conservatives now vilifying W. Mark Felt, since he was pardoned by their hero, Ronald Reagan — albeit in a separate case. Nevertheless, President Reagan’s statement, while granting a pardon in 1981 to FBI agents Mark Felt and Edward Miller, praised “their good-faith belief that their actions were necessary to preserve the security interests of our country” and also said that they were “two men who acted on high principle”.

* The indispensable value of one’s conscience in prodding one to do the right thing, irrespective of one’s personal motives, as long as one determines that there are tangible benefits to organization, society, government, etc. in the long run.

Finally, one has to wonder, without Deep Throat how would “our long national nightmare” have ended? Here’s one scenario – Nixon would have completed his second term, Ford would have then probably beaten Carter in 1976, but Ford would have then lost to Mondale in 1980, Reagan would have been too old to run in 1984, so Mondale would have won a second term by beating Bush Sr. instead, Clinton would have defeated Dole in 1988 (instead of 1996), but Clinton would have lost a second term to Perot in 1992 – both, Republicans and Democrats, must agree that without W. Mark Felt "our long national nightmare" would be still going on!

Intelligent Design of our very own "madrassas"

2005-05-22T23:43:00.000-04:00

It would seem to me that the proponents of intelligent design (ID) would likely concur with the literal meaning of the title of Thomas L. Friedman’s new book, “The World Is Flat”. After all, there is the popular myth that Christians in the Middle Ages believed that the earth was flat. The even greater myth associated with that era concerns Galileo, who is believed to have committed heresy by suggesting that the earth was round? As a matter of fact, however, Galileo actually suggested much to the chagrin of the Church that the sun, and not the earth, was the center of the universe. For this sacrilegious proposition, Galileo was condemned by the Church in a 1633 trial to lifelong imprisonment. In 1992, over 350 years after Galileo’s death, the best redemption that Pope John Paul II could offer Galileo was admitting

“that errors had been made by the theological advisors in the case of Galileo. He declared the Galileo case closed, but he did not admit that the Church was wrong to convict Galileo on a charge of heresy because of his belief that the Earth rotates round the sun.”

We have had our own taste of the “religion vs. science” debate with the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial, where the teaching of evolution in state-funded classrooms was deemed unlawful. In the decades since that infamous ruling, however, the United States has always been a nation on the leading edge of science and technology. Unfortunately, some educators in the country now seem determined to take actions that would put our youth at a disadvantage. In a May 17 editorial entitled “The Evolution of Creationism”, The New York Times laments that ID proponents in Kansas seek

“to change the definition of science in a way that appears to leave room for supernatural explanations of the origin and evolution of life”.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world is picking up on cutting-edge scientific discoveries that encroach into the boundaries of what ID proponents call “creationism”. So we will fall behind, not only due to the flattening of our world, but also due to the flatulence of our “creative” Luddites. Maybe this limerick might help shock them back to the infallibility of science:

Conservatives from the plains of Kansas
Are creating doubts about the sciences
Evolution they say is not fully refined
So with one small step for intelligent design
They take a giant leap to our very own “madrassas”

Or maybe rapid developments in science will do the trick, anyway? In an editorial today entitled “A Surprising Leap on Cloning”, The New York Times bemoans the fact

“that leadership in ‘therapeutic cloning’ has shifted abroad while American scientists, hamstrung by political and religious opposition, make do with private or state funds in the absence of federal support”.

The Times reported yesterday that President Bush further exacerbated the problem by promptly threatening to deploy the first veto of his presidency “over the thorny issue of embryonic stem cell research”. So we have a President — although beset with serious foreign policy crises in Iraq, Iran, and North Korea and facing gargantuan domestic policy issues such as social security and budget deficits — choosing instead to expend his political capital over the Terri Schiavo case, the “nuclear option” on judicial appointments, and stem cell research! If the President and his Republican cohorts in Congress don’t get their act together real soon, these moral and social values — which they claim got them elected with improved majorities in 2004 — will surely come back to haunt them in 2006. At least that's what all the recent polls — scientific polls, I might add — are indicating?

Colonial Imprints and Perceived Proselytizing in the Muslim World

2005-05-19T22:17:00.000-04:00

The Wall Street Journal ran, what I thought was, a self-serving editorial entitled “Journalists and the Military” on May 17. In it they sanctimoniously chastised Newsweek for its explanation of what they called a “dubious Koran desecration story”. So I wrote them the following letter in response:

Why is it that conservative media outlets, such as yours, exhibit a “holier than thou” attitude when writing about the media in general? The “basic media mistrust of the military that goes back to Vietnam and has shown itself with a vengeance during the Iraq conflict and the war on terror” is a figment of your imagination. The reality is that the larger media is still smarting from being “led by the nose”, by the Bush Administration and its conservative media backers (you, again), during the build up to the Iraq war. I am inclined to believe that the larger media does not mistrust the military – it mistrusts those that led us into this war on false pretenses!
Needless to say, my contrarian viewpoint was not included among the seven largely supportive (of their editorial) letters that got published in today’s edition of the Journal under the headline, “Newsweek and the Story That Never Was”. Notwithstanding their rejection, I was placated by David Brooks’ column entitled “Bashing Newsweek” in today’s New York Times. By seeing the forest for the trees, this conservative columnist offered a rational analysis of the entire incident, including the subsequent hysteria that it generated.

Now, Anne Applebaum had also made some good points on the Newsweek story in her column entitled “Blaming the Messenger” in yesterday’s Washington Post. However, she had concluded her piece with the following statement:

And, yes, people whose military and diplomatic priorities include the defeat of Islamic fanaticism and the spread of democratic values in the Muslim world need to be very, very careful, not only about what they say but about what they do to the Muslims they hold in captivity.
In my mind, there is an inherent contradiction embedded in this statement and it is captured in the phrase “Islamic fanaticism”. When the western media qualifies the fanatical behavior of terrorists by associating it with the Islamic faith – that in of itself is a problem! Even if this association were true in the eyes of the western media, the war on terrorism can never be won until such a derogatory association between fanaticism and Islam is severed. If we are to win over the hearts and minds of the larger Muslim populace, the western world – which happens to be a largely Judeo-Christian world – has to “cease and desist” from linking terrorism with Islam. As long as the insurgents in Iraq are viewed as defenders of their faith by the larger Muslim populace, it will be almost impossible for us to rid Iraq of the insurgency. Similarly, Osama Bin Laden can never be captured as long as we continue to represent him as an “Islamic fundamentalist”. In fact, I have repeatedly made this point in my forthcoming book, “The Bush Diaries”, as illustrated in the sample below:

History has proven time and again that wars, which are based on religious differences, last for the longest time. Neither side is ever willing to concede that they are the “children of a lesser God”. The western world’s consistent references to “Islamic fundamentalism” only fuel the anger of the Muslim world. If the war on terrorism is ever to be won it has to be divested of its religious inferences.
This might sound simplistic, but it is the truth. Newsweek happened to touch a raw nerve, which had long been exposed by the serial bungling – as characterized by Ms. Applebaum in her column – of the Bush Administration in its prosecution of the war on terrorism. If we are to win this war, the western world’s policies must be consistent – not only “walking the walk” without any colonial imprints, but also “talking the talk” without any perceived proselytizing – throughout the Muslim world.

GOP's Feeding Tube of Faith

2005-04-24T02:12:00.000-04:00

In a recent appearance on “The Daily Show” to promote his new book entitled, “The World Is Flat”, New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman, talked about how the global economy is leveling the playing field between the United States and the developing world. Mr. Friedman expressed genuine concern about the diminishing interest among our youth to pursue science and engineering careers. Without making light of Mr. Friedman’s apprehension, I would point to a sense of misplaced priorities within the Bush Administration that have exacerbated not only this problem but several other more pressing issues of the day.

From the under-funded “No Child Left Behind” program to the over-hyped “Clear Skies” initiative, the Bush Administration has paid more lip service to the domestic economy than the facts bear out. President Bush has gone around the country for the past sixty days touting a fix to the Social Security system that might go bankrupt in 2041, while he continues to ignore a soaring half-trillion dollar budget deficit and a seven and one-half trillion dollar national debt, which are both here and now. Ironically, the President signed a Bankruptcy Bill last Wednesday – this is tantamount to the Bush Administration telling us that if we live beyond your means, we will no longer be able to escape the consequences – which is fine. But then, the Bush Administration continues to spend our money like there is no tomorrow – with no repercussions to worry about. That's the beauty of "political capital" - it's the President’s to spend now and for someone else to clean up later!

Speaking of cleaning up and “Clear Skies”, it seems even Mother Nature expressed its displeasure at the Bush Administration’s environmental policy on Earth Day last Friday. The Washington Post reported that the weather refused to cooperate with the President’s plan to celebrate Earth Day in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. One wouldn’t normally have associated any sort of divine justice in this weather-related intervention, if it weren’t for the deliberate choice of the Republican leadership to play up the “faith factor” at every possible opportunity since the last election. In what seems to be an audacious power play, Senator Majority Leader Bill Frist will just not let the GOP’s feeding tube of faith be unplugged from the nation’s consciousness. New York Times columnist, Frank Rich, warns us about “A High-Tech Lynching in Prime Time” about to take place tonight. With his unabashed participation in “Justice Sunday”, Senator Frist only confirms that the GOP has moved so far to the right that – if the world were really flat – most of the GOP leadership would be falling off a cliff in the next galaxy!

But this is hardly the “Revenge of the Sith” and would that we all were so lucky? The Republican leadership is turning the GOP into that awful relative – one that you cannot live with, and yet one that you cannot get rid off. Just as you begin to think that it’s only our domestic policies that are screwed up, because the Bush Administration really has the foreign policy under control, along comes this bombshell. In a report yesterday entitled, “U.S. eliminates annual terrorism report”, The Seattle Times tells us that

“The State Department decided to stop publishing an annual report on international terrorism after the government's top terrorism center concluded that there were more terrorist attacks in 2004 than in any year since 1985”.

Holy cow! I thought we were winning this thing, and with freedom and democracy sprouting all over the world, we were all going to live as one big happy family? Talk about a leap of faith!

Imagine – no more 9/11s – it’s easy if you try!

2005-04-16T12:55:00.000-04:00

My first reaction while reading Senator John Kyl’s “Unready For This Attack” in today’s Washington Post was that the senator has been watching Fox’s primetime TV hit “24” this season. Earlier this year, “24” featured an episode wherein a section of downtown Los Angeles is brought down by “an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack” by terrorists. But then Senator Kyl concluded his article with the following warning:

The Sept. 11 commission report stated that our biggest failure was one of "imagination." No one imagined that terrorists would do what they did on Sept. 11. Today few Americans can conceive of the possibility that terrorists could bring our society to its knees by destroying everything we rely on that runs on electricity. But this time we've been warned, and we'd better be prepared to respond.

Well, Senator you don’t know Jack! Now, I mean that quite literally – while you probably recognize Jack Bauer, the hero of “24”, you surely have not heard of yours truly – Jack Nargundkar of Germantown, Maryland? On the eve of the new Millennium (December 31, 1999), almost two years prior to 9/11, I had written an article entitled, “Musings for the New Millennium”, which is still posted on my web site. In it I had dreamed up this rather fatalistic scenario:

Finally there has been a whole lot written about the best “this” of the century and the best “that” of the millennium. In my opinion, the single most seminal discovery, since the beginning of time, is undoubtedly the invention of electricity! Mankind’s dependence on this fundamental phenomenon of nature as a source of energy is so basic to our existence – from the simple light bulb to sophisticated electronic appliances, from computers to communications, from transportation to manufacturing, from health care to agriculture, from the outer reaches of space to the inner depths of sub-molecular matter, etc. – we would be back in the Stone Ages if the concept of electricity failed! Our transition from the mechanical age to the Industrial Age, and on to the Information Age has been possible because of our dependence on this basic resource. We have tried to harness electric power through various means using drivers like water, the wind, the sun, and even nuclear reactions. Y2K bugs don’t scare me even a fraction of what would happen if those electrons suddenly stopped moving? It gives new meaning to the saying “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”!

So I’d like to say, Senator, people do have vivid imaginations – but most of us, unlike the terrorists, don’t use our minds for destructive purposes. I would like to add that I personally believe that it will be very difficult for terrorists to carry out another 9/11-type attack on the United States. The terrorists possessed the “operational expertise” to execute a 9/11. However, unless they recruit – an interconnected network of people with the necessary talent and skills –within our borders, I suspect that they are going to find it almost impossible to carry out any more attacks on our homeland that require the kind of sophisticated intellectual expertise, which Senator Kyl worries about. Having said that, I wouldn’t suggest for a second that we not remain vigilant – it has become the eternal price to maintain our way of life. I would like to end by mentioning that my “Musings for the New Millennium” article was more prescient in another respect – I had actually called the historic 2000 presidential election almost a year in advance with this fantastic, or so it seemed at the time, outcome:

In fact, this could turn out to be a squeaker, where the losing candidate gets a slightly higher percentage (possibly within a 1 percent margin of the winning candidate) of the popular vote, but the winning candidate scores a majority of the Electoral College delegates. You read it here first!

Imagine, Senator, it’s easy if you try, as John Lennon once did:

You may say I’m a dreamer,
but I’m not the only one,
I hope some day you'll join us,
and the world will live as one

Third World Power Play

2005-04-12T17:15:00.000-04:00

When China and India “hook up”, it’s more like a third of the world in play – because the power is in their sheer numbers. John Lancaster’s report entitled “India, China Hoping to 'Reshape the World Order' Together” in today’s Washington Post makes me want to say “I told you so”. In any event, the highlights of Mr. Lancaster’s report are as follows:

* “India-China relations have now acquired a global and strategic character” per a joint statement by the two nations
* China also announced its support for India's bid for a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council
* China and India signed agreements on trade, economic cooperation, technology sharing, civil aviation and other matters
* India and China pledged to boost their trade to $20 billion by 2008 (the same level as US-India trade in 2004)

Well, nearly two years ago, in response to a George Melloan article[1], I had written a letter to The Wall Street Journal on June 24, 2003. Although it was never published, I would like to reproduce the following excerpt from that letter, which I have also included in my book, “The Bush Diaries”:

Coincidentally, only a day earlier, the leader of the world’s most populous country, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao of China welcomed the leader of the world’s largest democracy, Prime Minister Vajpayee of India. If President Bush were following a truly principled foreign policy, which actually saw the forest for the trees, he would recognize that our long-term interests are not being served by sacrificing our democratic ideals at the expense of our security needs? Pushing India, a close ally of Russia, into the arms of China – creates a triumvirate with far-reaching influence across the globe! How long before Germany and France jump on that bandwagon?

Then in January of this year, I made this further observation in my yet to be published “The Bush Diaries”:

But I see two headstrong democracies, the oldest and the largest, butting heads over foreign policy differences, much along the lines that I have written throughout this book. Now that India’s economy has opened up, I can see the United States and India getting closer as economic partners – in the long run, probably developing stronger economic ties than we have with China? Whether we can make India a true political and military ally anytime soon is highly doubtful? Our post-9/11 tilt towards Pakistan, despite its links to the Taliban government in Afghanistan, did not sit well with the larger Indian population. Also, the recent rewarding of “major non-NATO ally” status to Pakistan, while Osama Bin Laden is still on the loose inside Pakistan, was a slap in the face to India. If the U.S. pushes for making India a permanent member of the Security Council, as it should be, then “Old Europe could make some headway for New Delhi”. Although I do believe that we do not need to sacrifice Old Europe, in order to make new friends. Nevertheless, it is a strategic imperative for the United States to quickly re-align itself to the new realities in the Asia-Pacific region.

When Thom Shanker and Joel Brinkley's report entitled, "U.S. Is Set to Sell Jets to Pakistan; India Is Critical" appeared recently in The New York Times, I notched up another unpublished letter (dated March 26, 2005) that provided this blunt admonition:

In the post-Cold War era, U.S. foreign policy can no longer be based on equating its traditional ally, Pakistan, with India. This is tantamount to equating Taiwan with China - which continues to be under a Western nations arms embargo that the Bush Administration is pressuring the European Union from lifting. The overall effect of this Bush policy is going to bring, not only China and India closer, but also rekindle Russia as a potential arms supplier to both nations. From an economic standpoint, OPEC countries such as Iran and Venezuela have already announced as key suppliers of their energy needs. It isn't unrealistic to expect a new Shiite power (Iran-Iraq) to emerge as a counter to the reigning Sunni (Saudi Arabia-Kuwait-U.A.E) sway in OPEC.

As the new triumvirate of China-India-Russia becomes increasingly powerful, its influence will start drawing other nations such as Afghanistan, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Indonesia, Malaysia, and eventually the new Iraq further away from the U.S. fold. If we do not play our foreign policy cards right, we could witness a structural realignment in the next decade, whose impact on the western world could be worse than that of the Cold War. To be forewarned is to be forearmed.

In the light of today’s Post report, this power play - by two nations that represent a third of humanity - is the first big move towards aforementioned structural realignment. I trust that the foreign policy visionaries in the Bush Administration are looking beyond “freedom and democracy” in the Middle East. For there is a political tsunami brewing further east and it has the potential to wash up far beyond its shores!

[1] George Melloan writes the “Global View” column for The Wall Street Journal. This particular article entitled “Bush Wades Into Some of The World's Worst Messes” appeared in his column on June 24, 2003.

Jack Nargundkar vs. James Taranto in “Best of the Web Today”

2005-04-05T19:00:00.000-04:00

Who would have thought that my letter published in The New York Times on Friday, April 1, 2005 would create such a buzz? The letter pointed out several lessons learned from the Terri Schiavo case. But this one point in the letter seemed to have especially galled conservatives:

The most critical conclusion to be drawn from the [Schiavo] case is that with the injection of religion into our politics and our governance, it has become increasingly difficult to differentiate between the demands of "evangelism" in a Western democracy and "fundamentalism" in a Middle Eastern theocracy.

So James Taranto, Editor of the OpinionJournal, offered me some help in his “Best of the Web Today” column yesterday. In offering me that unsolicited advice, I felt that Mr. Taranto had missed the crux of my argument. I therefore e-mailed him a clarification this morning. Sure enough, Mr. Taranto published only the first part of my response in his column today. Here’s the second part, which he did not publish, and which is critical to my line of reasoning:

James, in my letter to the The New York Times, I had also said, "If we really want to promote a 'culture of life', then human life ought to be precious in every situation, and not only under political circumstances." Politicians (Congress and the President) tried to force the courts to act in a certain way (i.e., reinsert Terri Schiavo's feeding tube, in order to save her life). The courts, per their interpretation of the law, consistently refused to act in the way intended by these politicians. If we are to convince other nations, including fledgling democracies and Middle Eastern theocracies that we are a nation of laws, albeit, secular laws - then, evangelists in this country need to accept that fact as gospel! With your distinguishing remark, "If someone is demanding that a life be spared, he's probably an evangelist in a Western democracy. If he's demanding the infidels be murdered, chances are he's a fundamentalist in a Middle Eastern theocracy", you confirm my other observation in my letter to the Times - conservatives have let emotions override their better judgment on this issue!

In drawing “attention to sloppy thinking” in today's column, Mr. Taranto makes a conclusion, which I never did:

“But equating them to fundamentalist terrorists is a cheap shot, and an intellectually indefensible one.”

I never inferred that evangelical Christians, trying to save the life of a woman on life support, were the equivalent of fundamentalist terrorists. My larger point was simply this - if we let our religious beliefs dictate against the established law of the land, we are not only violating our constitution but also allowing ourselves to become like them. Mr. Taranto's refers to Martin Luther King as one:

"who made no effort to separate his belief in racial equality from its roots in Christianity".

But Mr. King equally drew from "The Declaration of Independence" in demanding this equality:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

It is OK to use one’s faith as a personal guide to govern, but it is unconstitutional to use one’s religion as an instrument of government – that’s what theocracies do. By honoring the principle of “separation of powers”, we should all want them to become more like us - that was my key message in my letter to the Times!

The Neo Con Job

2005-03-27T12:42:00.000-05:00

The question has been asked so many times since 9/11 that asking it one more time might seem redundant – why do they hate us? However, one of the answers to this perennial quandary can be found in a report in today’s Washington Post by Dafna Linzer entitled, “Past Arguments Don't Square With Current Iran Policy”. It begins with this devastating exposé:

Lacking direct evidence, Bush administration officials argue that Iran's nuclear program must be a cover for bomb-making. Vice President Cheney recently said, “They're already sitting on an awful lot of oil and gas. Nobody can figure why they need nuclear as well to generate energy.” Yet Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and outgoing Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz held key national security posts when the Ford administration made the opposite argument 30 years ago. Ford's team endorsed Iranian plans to build a massive nuclear energy industry, but also worked hard to complete a multibillion-dollar deal that would have given Tehran control of large quantities of plutonium and enriched uranium -- the two pathways to a nuclear bomb.

Talk about a 180 – this incredible report further reveals the following:

“It is absolutely incredible that the very same players who made those statements then are making completely the opposite ones now,” said Joseph Cirincione, a nonproliferation expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Do they remember that they said this? Because the Iranians sure remember that they said it,” said Cirincione, who just returned from a nuclear conference in Tehran -- a rare trip for U.S. citizens now. In what Cirincione described as “the worst idea imaginable,” the Ford administration at one point suggested joint Pakistani-Iranian reprocessing as a way of promoting “nonproliferation in the region,” because it would cut down on the need for additional reprocessing facilities.

After the Iranian revolution toppled the Shah of Iran in 1979, it caused a dramatic reversal in U.S. foreign policy in the region. In fact, the Reagan Administration went on to support Iraq through much of the Iran-Iraq war in the eighties. Hence, we should not be too surprised in the near future, if “newly declassified documents” from that era go on to establish that Reagan Administration officials had sanctioned the supply of the chemical and biological ingredients for Saddam Hussein’s fledgling WMD programs? After all, there is that infamous video from December 20, 1983 showing Donald Rumsfeld, as President Reagan’s special envoy, meeting with Saddam Hussein in Baghdad. It’s no wonder comedian Mark Russell had quipped prior to the start of the current war with Iraq, “We know he’s got those weapons of mass destruction… We’ve got the receipts!”

Any wonder why they hate us?

The Unwritten Amendment

2005-03-23T18:12:00.000-05:00

In a 10-2 decision, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reaffirmed what a three-judge panel from the same court had decided earlier today, which was what U.S. District Judge James D. Whittemore had ruled yesterday – Congress will make no law that makes a mockery of our system of justice – I call it the unwritten amendment to the Constitution. But seriously, the judicial branch firmly rejected President Bush and Congress's nocturnal attempt at subverting states rights over this past weekend. In a brilliant editorial on Tuesday entitled, "A Blow to the Rule of Law", The New York Times lambastes this blatantly political effort by the ruling troika (Bush, Frist, and Delay) –

“The new law tramples on the principle that this is ‘a nation of laws, not of men,’ and it guts the power of the states. When the commotion over this one tragic woman is over, Congress and the president will have done real damage to the founders' careful plan for American democracy.”

It would be ironical if this case finally lands up in the Supreme Court, whose questionable intervention in that other famous Florida court case (Bush v. Gore) in 2000 epitomized the dilution of states rights. After their infamous 5-4 ruling handed the presidency to George W. Bush, the popular joke back then was that we were not a banana republic, we only had banana Republicans – but the real life GOP of the past weekend surely imitated the art! The Times editorial concludes with this dire warning –

“President Bush and his Congressional allies have begun to enunciate a new principle: the rules of government are worth respecting only if they produce the result we want. It may be a formula for short-term political success, but it is no way to preserve and protect a great republic.”

The original George W. – father of our nation – must surely be turning in his grave.

The Age of Truth

2005-03-21T23:30:00.000-05:00

When both, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, run op-eds that come down on the same side of the same issue on the very same day – it feels like you have died and gone to heaven! I experienced this state of nirvana today, which is ironically the traditional day for the vernal equinox or the start of spring. But I am getting ahead of myself…

Robert D. Blackwill, who was the U.S. ambassador to India from 2001-2003, and deputy national security adviser for strategic planning in 2003-2004, wrote an op-ed entitled, “A New Deal for New Delhi” in the March 21, 2005 edition of The Wall Street Journal. Larry Pressler, who is a former Republican senator from South Dakota, wrote an op-ed entitled, “Dissing Democracy in Asia” in the March 21, 2005 edition of The New York Times.

Both these editorials basically say what every Indian-American has been pining for the past decade or more – and, pardon me for using a worn-out cliché one more time - it’s about time that the world’s oldest democracy and the world’s largest democracy “hooked up” in a more meaningful relationship. The Bush Doctrine, which in its second term incarnation – is more sensible and appealing – puts liberty and democracy in the forefront of U.S. foreign policy. Mr. Pressler calls for “a fundamental policy shift for the subcontinent” that “should enthusiastically improve our treatment of India”, “favor India in all major regional disputes”, “help India match China's arms buildup”, and “work toward a modified free-trade agreement with India”. Mr. Blackwill wants to “integrate India into the evolving global nonproliferation regime as a friendly nuclear weapons state”, “sell India civil nuclear reactors”, “enter into a vigorous long-term program of space cooperation with India”, “sell advanced weaponry to India”, “support India as a permanent member of the Security Council”, and “initiate an intense and secret discussion with India regarding the future of Pakistan”.

As a Hindu, I am inclined to believe that in the Vedic cycle of life, “Satya Yuga” or the “Age of Truth” has finally returned. If this were a dream, I wouldn’t want anybody to wake me up!

From the Gulag to the Gitmo

2005-03-13T16:30:00.000-05:00

Today's Washington Post editorial "More Excuses" reminded me of that memorable scene from the Jack Nicholson movie, “A Few Good Men”. In this instance, however, I envisioned Vice Adm. Albert T. Church III roaring at his recent Senate Armed Services Committee panel hearing, “You can’t handle the truth!”

When President Bush looked into Vladimir Putin’s eyes and got a sense of his soul, he must have also realized why the Soviet Union thought that the gulags were indispensable during the Cold War? They believed that the security of the state was paramount, and it had no constitutional provisions for individual liberties. In the post-9/11 era, the Bush Administration has perpetrated the likes of Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, and an incredible phenomenon called “rendition” in trying to ensure the security of the United States. Putin must surely be thinking, "What used to be good for the goose (i.e., the Soviet Union), has become even better for the gander (i.e., the U.S.A)? So why does this Jim Hoagland[1] guy think I have a "siege mentality" and a "defiant demeanor"? Reassess this, comrade!" Note to Bush: in the long run, the gulags did not guarantee the security of the "evil empire".

To maintain any sense of credibility, as he goes about promoting democracy and freedom around the world, President Bush needs to use the constitution of the United States of America as a guide, and The Declaration of Independence as a moral compass. The endowments of Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness are absolute - they cannot be traded for stability or convenience. If President Bush hopes to see, what Thomas Friedman[2] calls, a Baghdad spring "blossom into sustainable democracy" across the Middle East, he needs to practice what he preaches. Charity, per the old idiom, begins at home!

[1] The reference is to The Washington Post op-ed columnist, Jim Hoagland, whose article entitled, “Reassessing Putin” appears in today’s edition of the Post.
[2] The reference is to The New York Times op-ed columnist, Thomas Friedman, whose article entitled, “New Signs on the Arab Street” appears in today’s edition of the Times.

Democracy and the D-word

2005-03-07T23:57:00.000-05:00

The Sunday talk shows were abuzz about the possibility of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton being the Democratic nominee for President in 2008. Tim Russert, the host of NBC’s Meet The Press, asked Mike Allen of The Washington Post about it, “One of the senators that you cover, Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York--let me show you the latest Gallup poll in terms of the presidential race for 2008. Hillary Clinton, 40; John Kerry, 25; John Edwards, 17. What is going on?”

If you ask me, the world’s oldest democracy has finally succumbed to the lure of dynasty much like the world’s largest democracy. India was ruled by a democratically elected Nehru-Gandhi dynasty for 37 of its first 42 years since independence! If Senator Clinton is elected President of the United States in 2008 and completes even a single term in office, the Bush-Clinton dynasty will have been in power for 24 continuous years! Of course, there is no blood relation between Bush and Clinton, like there was between Nehru and Gandhi.

Nevertheless, for two families to head the government of a mature democracy like the United States for a contiguous two decades is simply remarkable. If Hillary wins in 2008 and is reelected in 2012, then we are talking “institutional duopoly” begging for a constitutional amendment that would bar any other Bush or Clinton from running for President for the rest of the 21st century! Hey, how else are we going to convince the House of Saud, the Assads of Syria, and the Mubaraks of Egypt that democracy is really not a family monopoly?

The Bush Doctrine gets a makeover

2005-03-04T15:16:00.000-05:00

My son, Jay, was the first one to call me around midnight from his college dorm shortly after I made my foray into this “fools paradise”, a.k.a. blogdom. Jay made this really original suggestion, “Dad, why don’t you write something new? Who wants to read about Bush’s first term, anymore?” I refrained from quoting Santayana, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”, but thanked him for his suggestion nonetheless. While we still have Bush to “kick around” for four more years, if we did not analyze his past mistakes, he is more than likely to repeat them (as us liberals fear) or make history (as his conservative base expects). In any event, nobody but nobody wants a war with Iran – even if, as President Bush declared at a news conference in Brussels recently, “all options are on the table”.

So I am reading Charles Krauthammer in this morning’s Washington Post and I am surprised to learn that his “Road to Damascus” goes through Beirut, but makes no stop in Tehran! In fact, Mr. Krauthammer’s only hint of Iran appears in this pregnant statement, “the entire region from the Mediterranean Sea to the Iranian border would be on a path to democratization”. It seems to me like there is at least one neocon who seems to have taken the Iranian option off the table? So will democracy stop at the water’s edge; will liberty be unable to cross the Persian Gulf? The answer lies in Iraq and the subsequent makeover of the Bush Doctrine by all manner of conservatives. They have decided that if the real world outcomes do not match the objectives of the Bush Doctrine, they will somehow make the Bush Doctrine match the real world outcomes.

The rai·son d'être for the Bush Doctrine was 9/11. Its core argument was based on President Bush’s notion that the U.S. would "make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them". It further postulated the right of the U.S. to preemptively wage war against terrorist cells and rogue states that were engaged in the production of, or in the possession of, weapons of mass destruction (WMD), which were deemed to be a threat to the U.S. and its allies. While President Bush promised to opt for multilateral solutions, he did not rule out unilateral action, if necessary. In its original incarnation, the Bush Doctrine did not clearly enunciate the need for liberty and democracy in all regions of the world. Such a requirement at the time would have plainly been an embarrassment to a number of our allies such as Egypt, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia. So when did the Bush Doctrine incorporate President Kennedy's liberal inaugural vision, as in, “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”

I would suggest that the creationists turned evolutionary after the collapse of the original justification for the Iraq War – which was Saddam Hussein’s possession of WMD that were deemed to be an imminent threat (remember Condi “mushroom cloud” Rice) to the U.S. and its allies – when no WMD were found. Per Colin Powell’s “Pottery Barn” rule, we pretty much own a broken Iraq that requires serious fixing. After his reelection, President Bush decided to outdo Kennedy at his second inaugural. Thus Iraq became a beacon for freedom and democracy in the region and around the world. In fact, after a successful Iraqi election on January 30th, the Bush Doctrine is no longer as much about our security as it is about freedom and democracy around the globe. Amazingly, the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal have already started touting a 21st century version of President Eisenhower's “domino theory”. In the post Cold War era, I am tempted to remind them that Vietnam remains one of the world’s few communist countries, along with that “Bay of Pigs” paradise, Cuba! Meanwhile, the original “evil empire” struggles with democracy but gets only a wink and a nod from our “soul penetrating” President. And, don’t even get me started on China, which in President Bush’s 2000 election campaign was supposed to be his top priority because he considered it a “strategic competitor” unlike then President Clinton, who he claimed treated China like a “strategic partner”? But then, we do have four more years of foreign policy evolution to live through, so “fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy ride”.