WhirledView

Will W Stonewall the Iraq Study Group?

PHK

Would someone please explain why the Bush administration launched its own comprehensive internal review(s) of U.S. policy towards Iraq about a month before the Congressionally-mandated bipartisan Iraq Study Group headed by James Baker and Lee Hamilton is due to present its findings? Or why W is likely to make mincemeat of the yet to be released ISG report because its recommendations, we're told, call for gradual US troop withdrawals? Seems to me W must have rejected that suggestion out of hand even before reading the report, his response was so quick. Or am I reading the tea leaves wrong?

Given the Great Decider’s latest pronouncement, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the purpose of those internal administration reviews by the JCS and others is not to compliment or reinforce the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group whose members approached the task methodically and with some of the best American expert advice available. Instead, the administration generated internal assessments – due the middle of December – will in all likelihood and with deliberate intention work at cross purposes. They will, I’ll bet, be shaped to fit the needs of W’s “stay the course” sink-or-swim policy that has been the bedrock of this administration’s approach to the Middle East all along.

I can’t help but think that the finger prints of Cheney and his neocon cabal will likely be all over the administration response to the ISG in their never ending chess game with the foreign policy realists - regardless of party affiliation. It’s unfortunate, but despite Rumsfeld’s push from grace, Cheney's neocon crew appears to continue to retain far too much influence on White House foreign policy decision-making despite what should be the national implications of the “throw the rascals out” results of the November elections.

Someone might want to remind them that if this were a parliamentary system, they would already be toast.

Could this explain why Philip Zelikow, the voice of pragmatism at the State Department, decided to return to academia and see his family once in a while: why go down with the sinking ship particularly if you’re advice is ignored anyway?

Passing the buck?

But could the result of this White House maneuvering be to paralyze the US decision-making process so that nothing can happen before W has been evicted from the White House in January 2009? If so why? Who benefits? Certainly neither Americans nor Iraqis. But I don’t think it makes W, his administration or his historical legacy look good either.

If it’s so our erstwhile president can declare that he “stayed the course” in his “global war on terror” despite the fact that Iraq under Saddam Hussein was never a breeding ground for Al Qaeda terrorists – unless you want to count the small group in the eastern mountains of Kurdistan, an area so remote and inaccessible that even the Kurds didn’t control it, then it seems to me what we’re looking at is a “pass-the-buck” pyrrhic victory.

Makes one wonder why anyone of either party would seek the presidency in 2008.

Turkey and the Pope: at a turning point?

By PHK

Every so often, Turkey commands the world’s media stage as it does right now during the Pope’s four day visit. Yet as far as I can discern, among the American MSM, only the Wall Street Journal has a bureau chief in Istanbul so it’s no surprise that our understanding of this important, moderate, democratic, and primarily Sunni Muslim country is usually as superficial and ill-informed as is the information we receive sporadic.

The two most insightful scene-setter MSM analyses I have seen in the U.S. thus far are the WSJ’s Istanbul Bureau Chief Hugh Pope’s Oped in the November 28 WSJ entitled “The West’s Eastern Front” and Newshour correspondent Margaret Warner’s November 27 scene-setter “Turkish Opinion of U.S. War Taints Relations.” Unfortunately, Hugh Pope’s Oped is buried behind the WSJ subscriber only screen, but Margaret Warner’s is available in text and video through the Newshour internet site. My advice: read the Newshour text and watch the video and if you can get to Hugh Pope’s WSJ article so much the better.

Also check out the New Anatolian: It’s an English language paper edited by Turks in Turkey with offices in Ankara and Istanbul. Its articles appear on the paper’s website as well as in print and the paper publishes a number of internationally savvy and interesting Turkish columnists. It’s well worth reading their reports and views of the pope’s visit.

Seems to me that our less than illustrious president and his so-called media experts could take a lesson in what looks to me to be a skillfully planned and carefully executed public diplomacy visit on the part of the Vatican - with a little nudging by the Turkish government - to include important Turkish sites like Ataturk’s Tomb in Ankara and the Blue Mosque in Istanbul. As a consequence, this trip could well result in a major shift in Turkish public opinion towards the pope – and in the positive direction.

Turkey and Religion

Another article with particularly relevant background on Turkey and religion is William Chislett’s special to the New Anatolian entitled “Freedom of religion: a conundrum.” This is the second of a three part series on Turkey. The others were on Turkey and the EU and the Turkish economy. They were written by a former London Times (reporting from Spain) and Financial Times (reporting from Mexico) correspondent now at Spain’s Elcano Royal Institute. Chislett was also a visiting scholar at Bilkent University in 2003 and lectured at Bogazici University in 2005 and has written two books on Turkey for Euromoney Publications. This article on religion was published in the New Anatolian’s September 16-17, 2006 edition: my husband and I happened across the newspaper and the article at a roadside kiosk in southwestern Turkey not far from the Greco-Roman ruins at Afrodisias.

Ignorance is not bliss

Most of the time the U.S. media just ignores this predominantly Muslim country of over 70 million people – over half under the age of 25 - at the juncture between Europe and Asia. On rare occasions it zeros in on the controversies that erupt between the Turkish secularist state, its western intelligentsia and anti-western Islamists. These disputes, however, are not easily or accurately described in Manichean, or black and white terms so beloved by Americans and our MSM. Not only do they require a basic familiarity with this complex country and its history – they cannot be characterized in 100 words or less – let alone in a 20 second sound bite.

The pope’s visit to Turkey is historic. Its purpose is far more than symbolic. It is also conciliatory: to mend fences not only between Roman Catholicism and the chiefly Muslim Turks, but equally to improve the papacy’s relations and begin to repair the nearly 1,000 year old schism with Eastern Orthodox Christianity through a meeting with the pope’s closest Eastern Orthodox counterpart, the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, who resides in Istanbul.

Estonian Wrapup

by CKR

Mostly photos from President Bush's visit to Tallinn. Here is the very best. The New York Times had it on its electronic front page for a while, but now it's just on their story, in smaller form. It's credited to Jim Young at Reuters.

Postimees has an equivalent, which is the one I've used. Theirs is by Raigo Pajula. Congratulations to both Pajula and Young for great photos, and to the Estonian National Bank for providing such a great setting!

Bush at Kadriorg Palace. Kadriorg Palace is Estonia's equivalent of the White House. (You can probably figure out that järgmine pilt means next picture, and eelmine pilt means previous picture, but just in case...)

Photos of the preparations and the very small demonstration (video of the demonstration here - click on Vaata videot).

Skype gave Bush a telephone.

A list of photos and videos from Eesti Päevaleht. If the cognates aren't enough to tell you what's there, just click on the links.

A minute-by-minute accounting of traffic jams. (eesti keeles)

Transcript of the press conference. (inglise keeles--whoops! in English)

Transcript of the presidential toasts. (Only two? It doesn't say if they were with Viru Valge?)

Iran: Watch Out for More Blowback

By PLS

I’ve got my bruised and swollen feet propped up with an ice bag flopped over them, thanks to a weird fall that abused practically every little pedal tendon and ligament there is, so I just read very two long articles at one sitting. Now I’m trying to find the heart (not sprained, though heavy, and occasionally hurt) to write about the state of the very badly bruised and busted world that Bush 43 has created.

The articles are: “The Next Act: A Damaged White House Eyes Iraq” by Seymour M. Hersh and “Iraq: The War of the Imagination,” a review essay, by Mark Danner, which takes off from Bob Woodward’s State of Denial, Ron Suskind’s The One Percent Doctrine and James Risen’s State of War.

The Demolition Derby

All the while, of course, I have been watching the TV news and the images that pile up like palimpsests, one on top of the other: the NATO-bombed and destroyed villages in Afghanistan, the coalition-demolished homes, shops and neighborhoods in the cities of Iraq. (Not to mention the ghastly results of Sunni suicide-bombing and Shia militia activity, etc., but that wasn’t happening in Iraq or Afghanistan until we got involved, and I’m concerned here with our own policy failures.) So: acres and acres of rubble. Heaps, piles, virtual mountains of rubble. Tombstones all to a failed policy of physical force applied absent any faculty resembling human intelligence.

Spell that h-u-m-a-n-e, while thinking of the dead—the babies, the children, the infirm, the old, the adults political and apolitical alike. Tens of thousands. Maybe hundreds of thousands. And more dead, as Bob Herbert noted, even as thousands of oblivious Americans got up before dawn to go on a post-Thanksgiving shopping spree for non-necessities to prop up the US economy. More dying. More homeless. More orphaned or widowed. A country pretty close to out and out civil war, according to Jordan's King Abdullah, normally considered a good friend of the US in the Middle East, and UN Secretary General Kofi Anan, whose public statements are usually extremely measured.

So Who's Emotional?

Am I being emotional here? Am I being sentimental? Am I being soft? Or am I just being swayed by the emotions that don’t guarantee war? Was there was no anger, no contempt, no hate, no loathing, no swaggering arrogance, no irresistible bubbling over of negative emotions among the pushers of this disastrous death-and-rubble-creating policy, these architects of disaster who seem to have thought they could give Iraq a blown up (pun intended) copy of a policy which has utterly failed to build a realm of safety for the Israelis?

He's There

by CKR

President George Bush arrived in Estonia at 10:20 pm local time. Estonia is 9 hours ahead of here, 7 hours ahead of Eastern Standard Time.

Photos from Eesti Päevaleht and Postimees. Postimees did better on the exit from Air Force One, and Päevaleht on the Caddy.

A letter from Rein Sikk, who describes himself as a simple journalist, to George Bush. This looks more interesting than the opinion piece I linked earlier; that one seems to be about how the "war on terror/terrorism" isn't really a war. That's just from a quick look by someone who barely understands Estonian.

Tomorrow's weather is predicted to be 3-8 C, with clouds and rain. But I don't suppose Bush will spend much time outside his heated car and the buildings.

They’re Everywhere

by CKR

No, not the Secret Service, and not Russian ethnics in Estonia! This is a science post of a kind I haven't done for a while.

Some long time ago, Thomas Gold went outside his field of astrophysics to suggest that petroleum was not the remains of dinosaurs or algae, but was formed from inorganic materials deep in the earth’s crust, an abiogenic origin, meaning without the intervention of life. Russian scientists have proposed similar origins of petroleum. A consequence that some have drawn from this idea is that petroleum is essentially inexhaustible. More recently, the petroleum pessimists have prevailed.

One of the arguments for dinosaurs and algae (more the latter than the former) as the source of petroleum is that complex molecules produced only by living things are found in petroleum and have been used, commercially, to figure out which rock formations the petroleum formed from and therefore where there might be more.

Gold’s response to that was that bacteria love to eat that abiogenic petroleum. He extrapolated that there must be lots of bacteria we’ve never met deep below the surface of the earth. The definitive experiment was supposed to be the drilling of the Siljan impact structure in Sweden. I’m not googling up any really wonderful links; what I recall of the results was that trace amounts of hydrocarbons were found, but nothing like what Gold had predicted. Some bacteria were found that might have been feeding on the hydrocarbons, but drilling technology at that time wasn’t sterile, so the bugs could have come from anywhere.

Some scientists continued to wonder how deep life might go, and they developed methods of keeping drilling cores reasonably uncontaminated by the bacteria that are around and in us all the time.

Securing the Airport

by CKR

John Brown and Ilo-Mai have provided an answer to a question I asked somewhere and can't find now. Many thanks to both of them.

How does the Secret Service propose to secure the Tallinn Airport? It's about as secure as an American airport before the great terrorist panic.

Eesti Päevaleht now provides the answer. They are wrapping the entire airport in white plastic. There are more photos at the link. It will be interesting to see just how far the wrapping goes, and if they provide large bows in honor of the Christmas season.

They're also building a wall around the Radisson (more photos). I have faith in the Estonians, though. They'll build this one as fast as they got those rocks around Toompea in 1991, and they'll take it down just as fast.

I have to wonder who's paying for all this. I'd like to see it be American money going to Estonian firms, but I'm not holding my breath.

Is It Possible?

by CKR

I don't want these two to get lost in all the other news.

Israel ready to free Palestinian prisoners

A truce seems to be holding in the Gaza Strip.

Could it be that the fighting in Lebanon this summer convinced the Israelis that there may be other avenues to peace than brute force? Is Prime Minister Olmert enough of a statesman to try a different track? Might George Bush learn something from this?

Stay tuned.

Estonian Coverage of Bush Visit Heats Up

by CKR

With President Bush scheduled to arrive in Tallinn tonight (täna õhtul), coverage by Eesti Päevaleht and Postimees is increasing. It's all in Estonian, but there are some photos. Maybe I can get back to some of it later.

Schedule and maps. (Less detailed schedule) I'm glad that Bush will get to see a little bit of Toompea, the upper part of Old Town, but getting the motorcade through those narrow streets will be a nightmare. And it looks like they'll pass by that controversial Soviet WWII monument.

Air Force One and the Bush Cadillac. Apparently an Air Force Hercules has already delivered the Cadillac and other vehicles.

Foreign Minister Urmas Paet hopes to discuss visa issues, Georgia, Moldava, and Ukraine. Last week President Toomas Hendrik Ilves declared "I am a Georgian!" He's got the same topics on his agenda.

Opinion from Daniele Monticelli, Tartu University researcher. [This article is the hardest for me to translate; maybe a description later.]

How Estonians Feel About the Bush Visit

by CKR

Postimees has a poll on the Bush visit. The percentages seem to be running pretty constant today, but if you want the latest, click on the link. I'll list the current percentages with my (approximate) translations of the options. Corrections of my Estonian, as usual, are gladly accepted.

Do you plan to see the Bush visit?

Yes, I plan to follow it on tv: 14%
Yes, I plan to see it in person: 5%
I am following only the latest reports: 42%
No, I am not interested in it: 39%