I see that Pakistan has reneged on a public promise made only yesterday to send the head of its ISI intelligence agency to India.

With Pakistan offering to help identify and apprehend those responsible, Gilani's office said the head of the Inter Services Intelligence agency would go to India at the request of India's prime minister, Manmohan Singh.

However, Pakistani officials said on Saturday that the decision had been changed and that a lower-ranking intelligence official would travel instead.

Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari blamed the about-face on a "miscommunication" with India. He said Singh had asked only that a "director" of the agency — not the chief — go to India to share intelligence.

However, the revision followed sharp criticism from some Pakistani opposition politicians and a cool response from the army, which controls the agency.

This is the third promise involving civilian control of the ISI which has been turned back by the military in recent months. Indeed, the only promise we don't know for a fact to have been unfulfilled is one made just before the Mumbai attacks that the ISI's political department, the one analysts feel was most heavily involved in using terror groups as proxies, was being disbanded. It would be naive to think the military and the agency intend to keep that one either. In fact, it would be ravingly naive to think that support for using terror groups as proxies was confined to "rogue elements" within the ISI and military. That's the story American officials seem to want to stick to but I continue to believe that the Pakistani military are really in charge in that nation and using the civilian democratic government as a convenient front to deflect the West, which wouldn't have accepted another military dictator easily.

However, there are still good reasons to question the other story that they want to stick to as well, the one involving India's finger-pointing at Pakistan as the prime mover behind the Mumbai attacks.

Crossposted from Newshoggers.

There are a lot of conflicting reports coming out of the Indian subcontinent right now, and no-one seems to have told their right hand what their left hand is doing. For instance, The UK's Telegraphreports Vilasrao Deshmukh, the chief minister of Mumbai, saying that two British citizens were among the terrorists who first attacked Mumbai two days ago and who are still being winkled out of their positions by Indian special forces- while elsewhere the Mumbai Police Commissioner Hassan Gafoor is being quoted as saying "We have found nothing to indicate they were British."

That confusion extends to speculation about who is to blame, although India seems to be prematurely certain. Pranab Mukherjee, India's Foreign Minister, has said: "Preliminary evidence, prima facie evidence, indicates elements with links to Pakistan are involved." India is stopping and searching Pakistan-flagged merchant vessels, yet the best indications are that the terrorists came ashore from Indian fishing vessels. Rather than admit it might have an indigenous terrorism problem, which would open an unhappy can of worms about tensions between militant Muslim extremists and equally militant Hindu supremacists, the Indian government is stretching as hard as it can to implicate Pakistan. Their working theory is that these Indian boats were hijacked off Pakistani shores - yet they've no evidence for that at all.

Analysts also say that the sophistication of the attacks point to training outside India, and Pakistan is India's favorite venue. But there are also Islamist terror camps in Bangladesh, where the 10,000 strong JMB group receives ample funding and arms from sympathizers across the Muslim world. Even in India, a massive country with large rural areas under-patrolled by police, Islamist terrorist camps have been found in the Karnataka jungles of the Southwest. The Maoist Naxalite movement operates in thirteen of India's twenty-six states and is a robust organisation with anywhere up to 20,000 members. In April 2006, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called the Naxalite threat the “biggest internal security challenge ever faced by our country.” There's plenty of indigenous terrorist training capacity, not all of it controlled by or even backed by Pakistan.

However, institutional paranoia is the defining mental state of Pakistani-Indian relations. One of the big stories right now in Pakistan is about official claims that India is planning to destroy Pakistan by thirst, using dams on the Indus to deprive Pakistan's population centers of water. Rumor has it that, when Pakistani President Zardari recently offered to commit Pakistan to a "no first use" nuclear policy in a broadcast to Indian TV, he infuriated his military leadership from Kayani on down. Indian finger-pointing will not have defused their anger.The Indian and Pakistani governments have said that the head of Pakistan's ISI intelligence agency has agreed to to go to Indiato share information, at India's invite. However, despite the PR spin of Zardari's civilian government it's in no way clear that the dog yet wags the tail when it comes to civilian control of Pakistan's military and that visit might yet not happen in such a hostile atmosphere - which Indian politicians will immediately see as a sign of guilt.  

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C-Span coverage of the attacks - and Deepak Chopra points out that the War on Terror turns moderates into extremists.

With more than 100 dead and reports of up to 900 injured, the horrific events in Mumbai have now moved into a second day. Attacks by well-armed and organised Moslem terrorists, who targeted UK, US and Israeli nationals in particular and took hostages at top hotels in India's financial capital, have catapulted India's boiling sectarian feuds and regional tensions into the news this Thanksgiving. Some of the most up-to-date reporting can be found at India's NDTV.com.

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Yesterday, Paul Sheehan of the conservative Sydney Morning Herald had a piece focussing onIsraeli hardliners in perpetual launch mode -

Last week I met the Boogie Man, the former head of the Israeli Defence Forces, General Moshe "Boogie" Ya'alon, who is preparing the political groundwork for a military attack on Iran's key nuclear facilities. "We have to confront the Iranian revolution immediately," he told me. "There is no way to stabilise the Middle East today without defeating the Iranian regime. The Iranian nuclear program must be stopped."

Defeating the theocratic regime in Tehran could be economic or political or, as a last resort, military, he said. "All tools, all options, should be considered." He was speaking in the tranquility of the Shalem Centre in Jerusalem, where he was, until last Thursday, one of Israel's plethora of warrior-scholars, though more influential than most.

Could "all options" include decapitating the Iranian leadership by military strikes, including on President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has called for Israel's destruction? "We have to consider killing him," Ya'alon replied. "All options must be considered."

Ya'alon is currently running as a Likud MP. Sheehan also spoke to other like-minded Israeli rightwingers, all ready to say that Israel must attack Iran and was preparing to do so.

But then again, yesterday TIME magazine's Tim McGurk wrote that an attack isn't on the cards .

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The IAEA has produced its latest report on Iran and there are few surprises therein, certainly no "smoking gun".

"To date, the results of the environmental samples taken at FEP and PFEP2, and the operating records for FEP3, indicate that the plants have been operating as declared (i.e. less than 5.0% U-235 enrichment). Since March 2007, twenty unannounced inspections have been conducted at FEP"...."The Agency has been able to continue to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material in Iran."

Most importantly, the IAEA guarantees that all known activities are under Agency seal and surveillance, and cannot be used to produce a weapon without Agency knowledge.

That doesn't stop the New York Times publishing a wonderful bit of hyperventilation involving (as is usual) the fine journalism of David "Judy Miller In Drag" Sanger and Bill Broad.

Iran has now produced roughly enough nuclear material to make, with added purification, a single atom bomb, according to nuclear experts analyzing the latest report from global atomic inspectors.

The figures detailing Iran’s progress were contained in a routine update on Wednesday from the International Atomic Energy Agency, which has been conducting inspections of the country’s main nuclear plant at Natanz. The report concluded that as of early this month, Iran had made 630 kilograms, or about 1,390 pounds, of low-enriched uranium

But the really important part, underplayed by that lede and the headline "Iran Said to Have Nuclear Fuel for One Weapon", is that there's no sign of a "breakout"- kicking out the inspectors, breaking seals and switching of cameras - which would be a dead giveaway. It would take months thereafter (about half the time it took to enrich the stuff to LEU) to enrich that LEU to weapons grade, and that's to say nothing of actually building a bomb with it afterwards. A minimum timeframe is in the order of a year and a half, in which the West could decide what to do next.

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On Wednesday, Iran announced it had tested what it said was a new missile. But Iran has a history of exaggerating its accomplishments in weapons development, variously claiming stealth aircraft that aren't and missiles that don't exist. Western experts reckon there was actually nothing new this time either - and in fact there may not even have been a "this time":

Andrew Brookes of the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies said: "I think the Iranians just keeping on rejigging the same missile and putting a new logo on it. It's basically the Shahab 3 with a different name, and the purpose of the test firing is to tell the world, 'don't forget us', we have missiles that can reach 2,000 kilometres."

"However, the launching of these missiles is not that meaningful because the Iranians have not developed an advanced minituarised warhead to fit into the front end, unless they are getting help from North Korea or Russia, and Moscow says it is not supporting Iran's missile programme.

... Duncan Lennox, editor of Jane's Strategic Weapons, said:.. "What is not clear is whether the test firing took place today or whether it's a photograph taken out of the archives but from the pictures it looks like a two-stage missile with a range of 1,900-2,000 kilometres."

And Dr. Jeffrey Lewis also notes that there's even scepticism over whether this rebranded missile, by either name, is actually solid fuelled - which makes a vast difference to its military usefulness as liquid fuelled missiles need a long time sitting on their launchers while they're filled with fuel (which can easily explode anyway) during which time they are sitting ducks for airstrikes.

Even such a missile is capable of hitting Tel Aviv, however - and the Israelis are supremely confident they could shoot it down before it did. It cannot reach Rome, Athens or Prague from Iran, and as such doesn't constitute any kind of threat to Europe. (Although it could reach Tbilisi, Georgia - but then again, so could earlier, far less sophisticated Iranian missiles, it's only 500 or so miles.) Even if Iran had missiles that could target Europe - and ever has warheads worth doing that with - as Dr. Lewis has previously noted, the Aegis cruiser platform would be a better alternative to the multi-billion boondoggle the Bush administration has proposed in Eastern Europe, both more effective and more sensitive to Russian concerns.

So what's going on? Well, Spencer Ackerman recently spoke to a bunch of Pentagon officials and military experts for a piece in the Washington Independent about Obama's relationship with the military and its supporters. Their unanimous advice was: "Consult, don’t steamroll — and don’t capitulate." and to make it clear there's only one Commander in Chief. In an adjunct piece at his FDL home, Spencer directly tackles the military budget and attitudes to "big ticket" procurement:

One of my sources for the piece is a Pentagon official who requested anonymity. He made a really interesting point that, alas, had to fall out of the piece. Despite the unsustainability of half-trillion-dollar military budgets during this period of dire financial hardship, the services will cling to their favorite big-ticket programs with an icy death-grip. If Obama's really going to make painful cuts to unnecessary defense programs, he's got to go all-out, making it clear that he's in charge and the cuts are happening no matter what. If he doesn't do that, he's going to get rolled throughout his presidency.

And he specifically links that to missile defense and Gen. Oberling, who told the AP:

The Air Force general who runs the Pentagon's missile defense projects said Wednesday that American interests would be "severely hurt" if President-elect Obama decided to halt plans developed by the Bush administration to install missile interceptors in Eastern Europe.

Oberling is due to retire in a couple of weeks. Does anyone doubt that his next job will be for either one of the contractors who stand to gain big-time from the ABM program or one of the neocon think tanks who have pushed it so hard as part of their "New American Century" plans? Those think tanks - themselves heavily funded by the very same arms manufacturers - have made explicit that missile defense should eventually include space-based weapons and be aimed at Russia too (thus Russia's consternation at the current plans) and intend a January push to sway the Obama administration and public opinion in an attempt to prevent Obama cancelling the program, as he has previously indicated he might.

These vested interests intend trying to steamroller Obama from word one, and Oberling is willing to bend the truth all out of shape in their service. He's pushing, as one ex-military writer puts it, "a ballistic missile defense system that doesn't work to defend it from ballistic missiles that don't work either." And the Cheneyites of the Right are willing to start Cold War II to get it, and the money for their arms-making allies that it represents.

However, Obama has said he'll cancel the program if it doesn't work as advertised - and the interceptors to be used at the European sites haven't even been tested yet. European leaders, too, are beginning to sound sceptical notes:
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France's U.S.-friendly president sent a clear message Friday to the next American administration: Plans for a U.S. missile shield in Eastern Europe are misguided, and won't make the continent a safer place.

... "Deployment of a missile defense system would bring nothing to security ... it would complicate things, and would make them move backward," Sarkozy said at a news conference with Medvedev. Medvedev smiled and pointed his finger at Sarkozy in approval.

...Sarkozy said he was worried about Russia's threat to deploy short-range Iskander missiles near Poland in response to the U.S. move.

"We could continue between Europe and Russia to threaten each other with shields, with missiles, with navies," he said. "It would do Russia no good, Georgia no good and Europe no good."

Sarkozy said he would discuss the missile issue with NATO counterparts at a summit early next year and proposed a pan-European security conference after that, to include Russia. Medvedev welcomed the idea.

All the more remarkable because:

1) Sarko wasn't just speaking for France - he was meeting with Medvedev as part of an EU-Russia summit and France currently holds the EU presidency.

2) His remarks came just days after the US missile defense supremo said that US interests would be "severely hurt" if the program was cancelled. Obviously, Sarkozy doesn't think that French or European interests would be likewise negatively affected.

Previously posted in a different form at Newshoggers

Dutch journalist Thomas Erdbrink, who is based in Tehran, has a must-read piece today in the Washington Post which details how, now that Obama is the President-Elect and offering no-precondition talks, non-trivial but junior members of the Iranian government are making noises about walking back their own offers to hold unconditional talks.

“People who put on a mask of friendship, but with the objective of betrayal, and who enter from the angle of negotiations without preconditions, are more dangerous,” Hossein Taeb, deputy commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, said Wednesday, according to the semiofficial Mehr News Agency.

... In recent interviews, advisers to Ahmadinejad said the new U.S. administration would have to pull U.S. troops out of Iraq, show respect for Iran's system of rule by a supreme religious leader, and withdraw its objections to Iran's nuclear program before it can enter into negotiations with the Iranian government.

"The U.S. must prove that their policies have changed and are now based upon respecting the rights of the Iranian nation and mutual respect," said Mojtaba Samareh Hashemi, the president's closest adviser.

Ahmadinejad's media adviser, Mehdi Kalhor, said that "in fair circumstances" Iran would be open to talks. "But that is not when you have a bayonet pressed at your artery," he added, referring to the U.S. forces deployed in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf.

All this provides neocon hawks with the perfect opportunity to bang the "prefidious Iranians" drum, and Ed Morrissey doesn't miss that chance:

This is the point that Obama and his allies never seem to understand.  Some people just hate us, and not because of our policies on trade and security.  Iran is a nation run by radical Islamist mullahs who see secular democracy as the enemy of their religion, and Western values as a temporary heresy which they plan to correct with a global caliphate under Iranian control.

Irans’ mullahs see America as the bastion of these values, and Israel as our outpost for them in the region.  Europe is mostly irrelevant to them; they can deal with Europe after eliminating the arsenal of democracy, or hobbling it so badly that we no longer make a difference.

But it's Ed who is missing the point. As Spencer Ackerman points out, Obama is more of a threat to those mullahs than Bush ever was. If you're an intransigent theocon Iranian leader:

All of a sudden, you’re deprived of a method of demagoguery that’s aided your regime for a generation. And if you refuse to negotiate, you’ve just undermined everything you told the international community you wanted, and now appear unreasonable, erratic, and unattractive to foreign capitols. Amazing how the prospects for peace are more destabilizing to the Iranian establishment than any inevitably-counterproductive-and-destructive bombing campaign or war of internal subterfuge.

That's an analysis born out by Erdbrink's past work too. Back in 2004, he co-wrote a Time piece which pointed out that "dominant hard-line clerics are worried that friendly American behavior might aid reformers, who are less anti-Western than the conservatives."

There's a presidential election in Iran next year and a moderate now heads the committee which would choose the replacement for the ailing Ayatollah. In other words, it's not about nukes or about international opinion - its about the shakier thrones Irans hardline government now find themselves sitting upon; with the best weapon in their arsenal, Bush's neocon ways, consigned to history.

On the streets of Tehran, Reuters recorded some video "postcards to Obama" from ordinary Iranians back on Nov. 5th. The message - carry through on negotiations, forget the hawks.

Crossposted from Newshoggers, video added.

Add Mohammed el-Baradei to the list of those welcoming Obama's statements that he'd talk to Iran.

"If there is a direct dialogue between the United States and Iran, I think Iran will be more forthcoming with the agency," IAEA Director Mohamed ElBaradei said.

"(A) political opening will also convince Iran to work with us to solve remaining technical issues," he told a news conference in Prague after meeting Czech Foreign Affairs Minister Karel Schwarzenberg.

"That political component of the (Iran) issue requires in my view a direct dialogue with Iran and that's why I am very encouraged by President-elect Obama's statement that he is ready to engage Iran in a direct dialogue without preconditions.

El-Baradei, who was one of those that said plainly that Iraq had no extant WMD and was thanked for being right by a Bush administration push to replace him, also underlined that, to date, there is no proof Iran is seeking nuclear weapons either.

We are able to verify all their declared activities, we are able to verify their enrichment programme, which is a good thing. But we are still not able to move forward on clarifying some of the outstanding issues related to alleged studies that could have some linkage to a possible military dimension."

Iran says its nuclear plans are to make electricity so it can export more oil and gas.

"There is a lot of concern about Iran, not today but about Iran in future... whether once they develop the technology, what are they going to use it for, whether they will go for nuclear weapons," said ElBaradei.

"That is the concern shared by the Security Council." [Emphaisis Mine - C]

There's a lot in that snippet to unpack.

First of all, there's the unequivocal statement that everything the IAEA has so far checked has come up clean - a civilian program only and one that cannot now be re-directed to military uses without IAEA foreknowledge...

That warning period would be at least six months and possibly a whole year long, so why is anyone still talking about keeping military options on the table? Saber rattling is counter-productive in such a circumstance - there's plenty of time to put talk of such options back in process if Iran ever makes a move to re-enrich to bomb-grade but for now there is no such program.

Secondly - the "alleged" studies el-Baradei refers to are all from 2003 and earlier, from a time when US intelligence says Iran did have a nuke program, in a very early stage, which has since been shut down. Notice all those conditionals?

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James Brett is an Englishman who, in 1999 while on a business trip to Peshawar in the north west province of Pakistan, had his first glass of pomegranate juice, and fell in love with it. He founded the first pomegranate juice drink in the UK, Pomegreat (.pdf). Further research led him to Afghanistan, where the best pomegranates in the world are grown, particularly in the Kandahar region. A recovering substance abuser, Brett was also aware that Afghanistan was a major producer of heroin.

In 2007, Brett was invited to Kabul to talk to farmers from various regions of Afghanistan about growing pomegranates. He flew to Peshawar and drove through the Khyber Pass heading to Kabul While driving through the Nangarhar Province, he noticed a farmer in a field of opium poppies. After the seminar in Kabul, Brett bought a large piece of card and a blue marker pen, and wrote 'Pomegranate is the Answer'. On his return drive back to Peshawar, he saw the same farmer again in the field, jumped out of the car and ran toward the farmer with his makeshift sign. His horrified translator chased after this mad ginger-haired Brit, yelling, 'Don't go in there, you could be shot!' Undetered, Brett talked to the bewildered farmer through his translator, about the farmer's life, his family, his children, how he lived and why he grew opium, about Brett's own addiction to drugs. Brett explained that pomegranate was not only the best option as an alternative crop to opium poppies, but was the only feasible one for the Afghan climate and growing conditions, and promised to return to the farmer's land a couple months later with pomegranate saplings. He went home and set up a charity called Pom354.

Brett followed through on his promise, returning a few months later to find the farmer had discussed this idea with sixteen other families with land around his own; all of them wanted to become involved. From there, the plan snowballed – in January, 2008, Afghanistan Television interviewed him, and other farmers asked him for help in changing their fields from poppies to pomegranates. The local member of Parliament and a respected Elder in the Tribal system wanted to know more. A tribal meeting covering the entire Nangarhar Province was called, and 200 Tribal elders invited.

The tribal elders agreed to finish poppy cultivation and switch to growing pomegranates throughout the entire Nangarhar Province by next year, making the region of 1.3 million inhabitants opium poppy free for the first time in a hundred years. The elders told Brett that their decision was based not only on a desire to maintain a level of stability, but because he was the first person who had ever come to them as just an ordinary man rather than a member of a foreign government or a military advisor, someone who simply wanted to see positive change. The tribal elders and Brett then conducted the official opening ceremony in that first farmer's field, now cleared of poppies, and planted the first pomegranate tree sapling. A national meeting is now being planned to expand the pomegranate industry throughout Afghanistan, with the broad support of the Afghani tribal elders as well as the government.

If you'd like to listen to an interview with this remarkable, refreshingly mad Englishman, tune into this webcast on Radio New Zealand. You'll be glad you did. (h/t Sue Gee)

It's an aspect that right wingers are quick to dismiss and to denigrate, but the entire global community watched with interest at our elections. And for such a jingoistic bunch, the wingnuts don't appear to realize that the world is hoping for us to regain our previous status and set an actual example of democracy and freedom, not just lip service towards it.

Reuters News Service did a series of videos from all over the world with messages to President-elect Obama. The rough translations of the Iraqi messages (from YouTube):

1. (English) BAQEE NAQED, JOURNALIST, SAYING : "I as an Iraqi, I am asking Obama to keep his promise about withdrawing the U.S. security forces here from our land and we want friendly ties with Iraq people and government. We do not need an occupation here, we need people to help us to improve security situation and services."

2. (Arabic) MOHAMMED AL-SHABIKY CITIZEN, SAYING: "We hope from Obama to hold talks with neighbouring countries and represent new U.S. policy in Middle East and more specifically in Iraq."

3. (Arabic) FADHIL AL-SHAMREE, BANKER, SAYING: "We call upon Mr. President Obama to hold good relations with Iraq and pullout U.S. and multi-national forces from Iraq as soon as possible.".

There are more video postcards from Iran, Nairobi, Cuba, China, Israel, Palestine, France, Australia, and Russia. How inspiring it is to have so many people all over the planet regain hope in the US from this election.

Check out this very interesting interview with the Syrian ambassador Imad Moustapha at Foreign Policy magazine.

He says clearly that the US raid into Syria was a "criminal, terrorist act", that it was done for reasons of US politics, that it blind-sided State who he had been negotiating with...and that Joe Lieberman personally assured him that McCain will negotiate with Syria if he wins.

Foreign Policy: The United States claims its Sunday night raid was undertaken to stem the flow of militants into Iraq. Why do you think this raid happened?

Imad Moustapha: Do we know why? Of course not. The only analysis we have is that they are doing this for pure domestic political reasons that have everything to do with the elections and the electoral campaign. They want to come out with a story.

But we are still waiting for the U.S. administration to come out and tell the American people: “We killed [Abu Ghadiya], and here is the proof that we killed him.” We have presented our side of the story. We have published the photos of the eight people that were killed, their names, and what they were doing. This is our side of the story. Let the United States come with its side.

... Suddenly, after everybody has recognized that the situation has improved dramatically in Iraq, [the United States] comes and they attack a village in Syria. They coldbloodedly murder eight Syrian civilians, villagers who are totally defenseless, totally innocent. This is a terrorist, criminal act.

The implication here is that the Bush administration wanted to boost McCain's standing in the poills with a little shock and awe and, since Iraq just doesn't provide the requisite level of fearmongering any more and attacking Iran would be too big a can of worms to open, they decided to launch a raid into the weaker neighbour.

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Over at The New Atlanticist, Senior Advisor to the Atlantic Council Robert Manning notes that a new world order is being forged, with Americans largely oblivious to what's going on.

Don’t look now, but much about last week’s Asia-Europe Summit (ASEM) – from its remedies for the financial meltdown to its obscurity in the U.S. – spoke volumes about emerging multipolarity and the historic shift in global power.  Was America watching?

The milieu in Beijing, with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy schmoozing with China’s President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jibao, suggests that when President George Bush hosts what will be the first of several summits aimed at shaping new rules to govern global finance, he will hardly be the center of attention.

It may have been coincidence that the annual Asia-Europe gathering occurred smack in the middle of the worst financial crisis since 1929. But the symbolism was hard to miss. An Asia Rising holds the majority of global foreign reserves, over $4 trillion in foreign currency; Europe for all its flaws and lack of dynamism still boasts an economy as large as the U.S.  Yet most in the U.S. were largely oblivious, with coverage even on cable news networks nearly non-existent, and relegated to the back pages of the business section of the New York Times.

...What does all this mean for the U.S. as a global actor?  Well for starters, the stock of those clinging to the myth of a unipolar world makes the current Dow look robust. It was never quite true even in the one dimension where the U.S. is and will remain for some time indisputably overwhelmingly dominant: military power.

But a nation’s power, as the Chinese like to say, is a question of Comprehensive National Strength, with military capability one important indicator. In the real world, a nation’s usable power will differ, depending on the nature of the particular issue. In the world now taking shape, the most sensible operative model for U.S. foreign policy will in general terms shift from Single Superpower to Primus Inter Pares, first among equals.

Now, as a European living in America I'm undoubtably biased, but what Manning is pointing to seems to me to be a manifestation of American Exceptionalism, one so comprehensively pushed for so long that even self-confessed lefties who would like to see America's status as single and biggest bully on the block trimmed fall prey to it. Americans have been told for so long that America's status and power means that it doesn't have to care about the opinions of those beyond its shores unless it wants to that - surprise, surprise - Americans have stopped caring about what goes on beyond their own shores unless Americans are doing it. I've noticed this in my contributions to Crooks and Liars, where I mostly post foreign policy and foreign affairs pieces. With the exception of hot-button issues having an impact on domestic politics such as Iraq and, lately, Afghanistan, foreign affairs posts get about a third of the comments that domestic affairs posts do. And it's not just my posts - anyone writing such posts gets the same lackluster response. Quite often, several of the comments will be along the lines of "Who cares? Get back to the domestic scandal de jour."

(That lack of interest seems to be pretty pervasive on other sites too. The very best progressive or bi-partisan foreign policy analysis sites and blogs get a fraction of the readers that sites devoted to more domestic issues do. Of course, rightwing sites have the same ostrich attitude in spades, with the twist that they want America to continue doing it to foreigners as if it were still a sole superpower and are simply snearingly dismissive of any hint that such simply isn't possible any more.)

Sure, people are naturally more interested in what's close to home. But in today's world what's going on 'over there" is close to home. America's fall from sole superpower will effect every single American's life in immediate ways, from their bank account to their job to their sons and brothers fighting in foreign realms. I wrote once that American foreign policy consists of inflicting domestic policy on foreigners. In the new multi-polar world that's going to have to change some, but it seems to me that there's scant sign on either Right or Left that the bulk of Americans are ready to admit it in their hearts, rather than their heads.

Crossposted from Newshoggers

Syria has released footage it says is of U.S. helicopters on their way to an attack inside Syrian on Sunday.

The post headline is taken from NBC's Richard Engel in Baghdad, describing special forces crossing the border into Syria on Sunday, the first time U.S. forces have invaded Syrian territory in all these years occupying Iraq. The U.S. military, in an officially unofficial leak to the AP, are claiming hot pursuit of Al Qaeda fighters out of Iraq and have said little else about it other than that the U.S. is "taking matters into its own hands". Syrian eyewitnesses are claiming that US forces shot and killed seven men and a woman, perhaps even abducting two, while the Syrian government are taking it a step further and alleging children died too. So far, though, the only funerals that have been held were for the seven dead men, which locals and the Syrian authorities say were simply construction workers (and which Fox News' Mike Tobin, pulling faux facts unsupported by evidence or even official U.S. statements out of his ass, says were known Al Qaeda operatives).

What is certain among the conflicting reports is that U.S. forces have now ignored international laws and trespassed on sovereign territory in Pakistan and Syria in pursuit of dodgy intelligence, in both cases with reasonably credible reports of civilians wrongly slain. Technically, these are acts of war and only U.S. military might prevents them becoming so. We know that Bush has ordered that he must personally approve any incursion into Pakistan, and it seems that he must have done so for this Syrian trespass too, one that is unique in all the time that the U.S. has occupied neighbouring Iraq.

So why? Why now? Well:

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The Russians aren't fooled by continual protestations that America's missile defense plans are aimed at "rogue states" - none of whom yet has the capability of throwing a nuke at the U.S. and who probably would choose infiltration as a delivery method in any case. They've been beefing up their missile force, introducing a new mark and modifying existing missile types with decoys, in the face of American righwing zeal for destabilizing the balance of deterrence that has served the world so well for decades.

That's not surprising. I'm sure that Russian intelligence and military planners can read, and surf the sites of those rightwing think-tanks who have provided the intellectual impetus for the Bush administration, Mccain and others. They know that missile defense, despite the spin of the Bush administration, has always been about the Soviet Union, and then Russia. It's all about Reagan's Star Wars dream, which had as its focus the "Evil Empire" still described in such belligerent terms by John McCain.

For instance, they'll have already noticed that the Heritage Foundation is planning a major publicity push on missile defense in January, planning to pressure President Obama to continue funding the multi-billion program.

The wingnut think-tank will be releasing a documentary, called 33 Minutes, and is already boosting it on its own website. The fearmongering blurb for the film says:

A ballistic missile from a foreign enemy would take 33 minutes to reach the United States. With each passing day, this becomes a growing danger to America, yet our government has failed to build the missile defense systems capable of defending us against such attacks.

Our enemies are attempting to stockpile arsenals that threaten our freedom and prosperity. North Korea and Iran are the most prominent, but this also includes Russia, China and other nations that have missiles capable of killing Americans in very large numbers and threatening our allies.

The time has come to revive the strategic missile defense system that America uniquely can develop, maintain, and employ for its own defense and the peace-loving world's security.

This documentary aims to do just that by highlighting the disastrous consequences of a nuclear explosion on American soil - one that could happen in just 33 minutes.

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The folks at WhirledView have a bit of a scoop. Career diplomat Victor Tomseth was one of the 50 Americans held hostage at the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979. It's thus particularly significant that he should be one of over 300 former diplomats who have backed Barack Obama, and that he should have written an op-ed for the Register-Guard of Oregon and for WhirledView specifically backing Obama's Iran policy of negotiation.

As McCain’s friend Sen. Lindsey Graham, when asked by Goldberg to name something unusual about McCain, put it: McCain believes that “some political problems have military solutions.”

...Obama’s comments demonstrate a more sophisticated understanding of Iran’s relative power than the McCain view that Iran poses an existential threat. According to the Central Intelligence Agency’s World Factbook, in 2006 Iran spent approximately $7.35 billion on defense... Even tiny Israel has a military budget more than half again as large as Iran’s.

Granted, the possession of nuclear weapons is a qualitative advance in military capacity (provided it is accompanied by a capability to deliver such weapons). At the moment, however, it is highly doubtful that Iran possesses either a nuclear weapon or the capacity to deliver one against even Israel, let alone the United States.

Could that change? Obviously it might at some point. However, it does not appear that day has arrived or that it soon will (see the November 2007 National Intelligence Estimate key judgments, “Iran: Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities.”

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