WhirledView

No Diplomacy for You!

by CKR

I've been wondering where Condi has been through all the Baker-Hamilton uproar. She surfaced yesterday.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice yesterday rejected a bipartisan panel's recommendation that the United States seek the help of Syria and Iran in Iraq, saying the "compensation" required by any deal might be too high. She argued that neither country should need incentives to foster stability in Iraq.

This is, of course, a variant of the "asking for help" trope.

She said she did not want to trade away Lebanese sovereignty to Syria or allow Iran to obtain a nuclear weapon as a price for peace in Iraq.

Baker-Hamilton said that the Iran nuclear issue should be decoupled from negotiations over Iraq, but this is the woman who shook the specter of Iraqi mushroom clouds in our faces a few years back.

Meanwhile, David Ignatius actually has been talking to a Syrian.

As we made a line-by-line review of the [Baker-Hamilton] group's recommendations involving Syria, [Foreign Minister Walid] Moallem expressed support for nearly every item. When I asked if Syrian President Bashar al-Assad endorsed these positions, he answered: "He is the leader. I am expressing his ideas."

There's more, too.

Like Ignatius and unlike Rice, Senator Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) wants to find out for himself.

Both the White House and the State Department discouraged the trip. "We certainly do not encourage members of Congress to be traveling to Syria," White House spokesman Tony Snow said yesterday.

More senators, Democratic and Republican, are scheduled to meet with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad before the end of the year.

I know I'm repeating myself and others, but you don't know what negotiations will bring unless you actually negotiate.

Update: Here's the transcript of Ignatius's interview with Moallem.

Decoupling Marriage and Kids

By PLS

Weddings in the US now cost an average of $30,000.

Try googling “wedding costs” on the web and what do you find? Site after site promising info on how to finagle a more affordable wedding. Eight hidden ways to cut marriage costs. Ten tips to reduce wedding costs. Tie the knot without busting the budget. Best of all, supposedly, they’ll never know you’re cutting corners. Ha!

It used to be that people who couldn’t afford a big wedding and reception would elope. Cross the border. Go to Vegas. Slip a twenty to a justice of the peace after the bridal smooch—and done! Perfectly legal.

Now there’s another way. Don’t get married.

Once upon a time females had to marry for support. Good girls had to marry to have sex. And decent women had to marry to have children.

Now women can feed and house (and dress and amuse) themselves. Birth control rids unmarried sex of unwanted consequences. The old stigma of unwed maternity isn’t what is used to be.

Result: nearly four out of ten kids born in the US don’t have married parents. That’s a big increase, and it’s not attributable to impulsive, immature teenagers having babies out of ignorance or the predictable failure of just-say-no strategies. It’s couples not marrying. And single women worried about the ticking clock.

Whatever the sociologists say, I suspect the monster wedding also has something to do with the increase in unwed maternity.

And cost isn’t the worst of it. There are all the trivial-magnified-to-momentous decisions and preparations, preparations, preparations. The deadly awful new TV sit com called Big Day, borrowing the pattern of the grim anti-terrorism series 24 Hours, unfolds the day of a wedding in one-hour real-time tranches, and it features a wedding planner, one of those parasites whose unwritten job description is to make things totally pretentious and as costly as possible. The bride and groom, by comparison, are bit players.

Compared to such conspicuous consumption of time and money, the no-marriage option presents itself as a non-materialistic and sanity-preserving alternative.

Mission Impossible? Maybe, but first read the Report

By PHK

I read the Iraq Study Group report over the weekend.

If you haven’t already done so too, I strongly suggest that you – like Cernigsnewshog wrote he planned to do - put aside the seemingly never ending verbiage from the instant pick-it-apart pundits and read it yourself. Only then can you understand what this multifaceted report says and how its pieces fit together: it is, as James Baker said and wrote, not a laundry list of 79 recommendations to be cherry-picked. Rather, it contains a series of integrated proposals that advocate desperately needed changes in U.S. foreign policy throughout the Middle East including major shifts in the quality, size and goals of and for the U.S military in Iraq.

The report was the product of hardheaded, experienced realists on both sides of the political aisle seeking to provide a framework for extricating the U.S. military from the Iraq quagmire while refraining from opening a power vacuum that would all too likely engulf the region in flames. As co-chairs James Baker and Lee Hamilton have emphasized, unless US foreign policy in the Middle East changes profoundly and rapidly, the chaos that is Iraq could well become worse than an internal civil war: a black hole that degenerates into a nasty regional war with neighbors on all sides fighting hyena-like over the spoils.

The ISG report – which many columnists and editorial writers seem to have forgotten – was mandated by the U.S. Congress, not W’s imperial Executive Branch which has yet to figure out – or admit - that far too many of its foreign adventures – especially Iraq - are abject failures. This factor is crucial because no American executive – and particularly this one - wants Congress to second-guess, critique or criticize its words or deeds or worse, cut off the funding.

But criticism and questioning policies comes with our legislature’s territory in this balance of power system. Budgetary oversight is Congress’s responsibility. Further, the single most important issue in this past election was the American public’s dissatisfaction with the administration’s conduct of the Iraq war. The latest polls indicate this is at an all time low. Perhaps this is why W has begun to talk to experts in various agencies including, oh, my gosh, the State Department, met with three generals and two academics including neocon Eliot Cohen all critical of the report and just announced he plans to delay making a decision on future US Iraq policy until the beginning of the New Year. That’s fine, but it’s now mid-December and how many more people will be killed in Iraq while George W makes up his mind as he circles the Christmas Tree waiting for Santa Claus.

Olmert Says It?

by CKR

I see that one of my co-bloggers has beaten me to it by posting a news item on WhirledView Choice.

It's in the Los Angeles Times, too, and the Jerusalem Post, with Arab reaction here (h/t to p_r).

Ehud Olmert listed Israel with nuclear weapons states America, France, and Russia.

We've all known it. The United States wanted Israel to keep it quiet for fear of sparking an arms race in the region, and that worked for a while. But secrets have a way of getting out, and certainly Iran has figured that defense is better than strategic ambiguity.

Since it's America that has most been sucked into the contradictions of Israel's strategic ambiguity to the detriment of overall Mideast policy, it might seem that a creative, forward-looking American president might be able to use Olmert's admission to open up the dialog there.

Oh wait...

Tuesday Birdbath Blogging and Aloe Watch

by CKR

We had a mild day Sunday, and I was conscientious enough to make sure the birdbath was filled. That's a robin and three house finches. There was a waiting line in the trees. I really haven't been very good about keeping the birdbath filled, but I'm trying to turn over a new leaf.

Here are two photos of the aloe on Saturday, and two today. It's getting harder and harder to fit it all in, so I'll concentrate on closeups as we approach floret opening.

New Neighbors

by CKR

In WhirledView's move toward becoming a gossip rag, I give you today's news: Outed spy, ex-ambassador to settle in S.F.

It sort of goes with yesterday's. Or maybe it's the confluence of ley lines and general karma that so many enjoy here.

A Visit from Judith Miller

by CKR

Judith Miller will be presenting a colloquium at the Los Alamos National Laboratory this afternoon at the invitation of the Weapons Division.

She agreed to the visit under the condition that there would be no interactions with the press.

I should note that the Weapons Division is probably the part of the Laboratory most keenly aware of tradition, and one of the Lab's traditions is to invite people with a great variety of backgrounds who have something to say.

But I should also note that I'd love to be a fly on the auditorium wall.

The Restoration of Habeas Corpus: “We can ensure our security without giving up our liberty”

By PLS

I was going to write something “original” to urge the new Congress to take up the restitution of habeas corpus as the center of our system of law. Then I read the statement that Senator Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, prefaced to the introduction of the very necessary Senate Bill 4081, which will do just that. Senator Leahy says it all, eloquently. With apologies to the Senator for a few elisions and attention-getting sub-heads, here it is:

Without Habeas Corpus No Freedom

Habeas corpus provides a remedy against arbitrary detentions and constitutional violations. It guarantees an opportunity to go to court, with the aid of a lawyer, to prove one's innocence.

Even the ultra conservative Justice Scalia agrees that habeas corpus is “the very core of liberty secured by our Anglo-Saxon system of separated powers has been freedom from indefinite imprisonment at the will of the Executive.''

The Shut-'em-up-forever Act

The Military Commissions Act [provided that] any non-citizen determined to be an enemy combatant, or even ``awaiting'' such a determination—[including] the approximately 12 million lawful permanent residents in the United States today, people who work for American firms, raise American kids, and pay American taxes—can be detained, forever, without any ability to challenge their detention...simply on the Government's say-so.

Since then, the American people have spoken against the administration's ``stay the course'' approach to national security and against a rubber stamp Congress that accommodated this administration's efforts to grab more and more power.

The nightmare scenario

Back in September, I spelled out a nightmare scenario about a hard-working legal permanent resident who makes an innocent donation to, among other charities, a Muslim charity that the
Government thinks might be funneling money to terrorists. I suggested that, on the basis of this donation and perhaps a report of ``suspicious behavior'' from an overzealous neighbor based on visits from Muslim guests, the permanent resident could be brought in for questioning, denied a lawyer, confined, and even tortured. And this lawful permanent resident would have no recourse in the courts for years, for decades, forever.

Many people viewed this kind of nightmare scenario as fanciful, just the rhetoric of a politician. It was not. It is all spelled out clearly in the language of the law that this body passed. Last month, the scenario I spelled out was confirmed by the Department of Justice itself in a legal brief submitted in a Federal court in Virginia. The Justice Department, in a brief to dismiss a detainee's habeas case, said that the Military Commissions Act allows the Government to detain any non-citizen declared to be an enemy combatant without giving that person any ability to challenge his detention in court. This is true, the Justice Department said, even for someone arrested and imprisoned in the United States. The Washington Post wrote that the brief ``raises the possibility that any of the millions of immigrants living in the United States could be subject to indefinite detention if they are accused of ties to terrorist groups.''