Jim Morin / Miami Herald (August 20, 2008)

Terror War Re-Evaluated as Musharraf Steps Down.
By BENNY AVNI, Staff Reporter of the Sun | August 19, 2008

America and Pakistan’s neighbors are being forced to re-evaluate their strategy in the war on Al Qaeda and the Taliban after the resignation yesterday of President Musharraf, whose nine-year reign included a decision after September 11, 2001, to cooperate closely with America in the fight against international terrorism.

President Musharraf of Pakistan responds to people gathered after the farewell ceremony in Islamabad yesterday. Officials in Washington yesterday were careful to balance statements of praise for Mr. Musharraf with expressions of confidence that his successors would do just as well. But in New Delhi, where Mr. Musharraf’s recent misfortunes are seen as a probable cause for the renewal of Pakistani-Indian hostilities in the disputed region of Kashmir and elsewhere, officials were almost openly ruing his departure.

A Pakistani-born diplomat yesterday said it is ironical that Mr. Musharraf, after long being maligned as a ruthless dictator, could end up ushering in a new, more democratically oriented government in Islamabad. “He left like Nixon did, under pressure of probable impeachment,” the diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said. “Then again, he is also the first Pakistani leader to leave on his own, without being hanged, assassinated, or deposed by the military. For Pakistan, that is a certain step forward.”

But it was unclear yesterday whether Mr. Musharraf would stay in Pakistan, where some are calling for him to be put on trial, or be forced to seek asylum in Saudi Arabia, Turkey, or the West. Asylum in America “is not on the table,” Secretary of State Rice said yesterday. According to reports from the region, a Saudi plane departed Pakistan yesterday without picking up Mr. Musharraf, after sitting on the tarmac for hours. A leader of the ruling coalition in Pakistan, Nawaz Sharif, spent years in Saudi exile after he was deposed as prime minister in a 1999 military coup by Mr. Musharraf, who was then chief of the army.

“President Musharraf has been a friend to the United States and one of the world’s most committed partners in the war against terrorism and extremism,” Ms. Rice said in a statement.

“President Bush appreciates President Musharraf’s efforts in the democratic transition of Pakistan as well as his commitment to fighting Al Qaeda and extremist groups,” a White House spokesman, Gordon Johndroe, said. He added: “We’re confident that we will maintain a good relationship with the government of Pakistan.”

American officials said they were confident that the uneasy ruling coalition of the moderately Islamic party led by Mr. Sharif and the Western-oriented party that was led by Benazir Bhutto until her assassination and is now led by her widower, Asif Ali Zardari; son, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, and Prime Minister Gilani, would cooperate with America on the war on terror as closely as Mr. Musharraf did. “The war against extremism is bigger than one man,” a State Department spokesman, Robert Wood, said.

Mr. Musharraf’s “departure is a loss for the U.S. because the civilian government will not do as good a job against terrorism,” a former American ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, told The New York Sun.

In the aftermath of the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, “What we needed in Pakistan is someone to stand with us, and Musharraf did just that,” a Bush administration official said yesterday, speaking on the condition of anonymity. America reciprocated to the tune of $10 billion in military support for the Pakistani government after Mr. Musharraf promised to dedicate his army and intelligence services to the fight against the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

Now, according to some in Washington, the best remaining Pakistani partner in the war on terror is the current army chief of staff, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, who has yet to express a preference for any party. Meanwhile, the partnership between the Pakistan Muslim League-N and the secular Pakistan Peoples Party is fragile and unlikely to maintain Mr. Musharraf’s tight grip over the army and the country’s powerful Inter-Services Intelligence.

India is specifically concerned that a resurgent ISI could shift Pakistan’s attention to Kashmir and hostilities with New Delhi from the war on terror and the Afghan border. As speculation about Mr. Musharraf’s departure increased in recent weeks, India’s national security adviser, M.K. Narayanan, told a Singaporean newspaper, the Straits Times, that the president’s absence would leave “a big vacuum.” India is “deeply concerned about this vacuum because it leaves the radical extremist outfits with freedom to do what they like, not merely on Pak-Afghan border but clearly our side of the border too,” Mr. Narayanan told the paper.

In recent years, the long-standing tensions between New Delhi and Islamabad have eased under Mr. Musharraf. The two countries established commercial ties, while the situation in Kashmir grew calmer. During the last few weeks, however, cross-border attacks have increased, Pakistani-backed pro-independence Kashmiri fighters have intensified their activities, and diplomatic talks have slowed. Additionally, both India and Afghanistan blamed the ISI for the bombing in July of the Indian Embassy in Kabul.

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So, all acknowledge that the real power in Pakistan - military dictatorship or not - is in the hands of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and who rules over them? Quite clearly, there never was a Pakistani Ataturk - and what do these generals want? Whatever it is - it is not democracy.

What does Military Nationalism mean in a Pakistani context? Where is their loyalty when it comes to the Taliban, and even Al-Qaeda? What was their historic relationship to the Saudi Arabian money pipeline, or to the US involvement in the Cold War heating-up proxy-stage in Afghanistan with the introduction of religious extremism well funded via the Saudis? Will someone start using this Sunni potential as an antidote to the Iranian Shia element in the larger Islamic World? Historically, it was just only Pakistan, who besides the Saudi monarchy, recognized the annexation of Jerusalem by Jordan. Without a military hand ruling in Islamabad - this being replaced by a politically broad, but weak, alliance - will the ISI, and everybody else, find it more convenient to spend the ISI time now in playing the fields outside Pakistan, rather then trying to muddle the waters at home? Will anyone look under the rug of the old nuclear materials, and know-how sales, and will there be a second round of this sort of sales - specially as they have more to offer then Iran or North Korea?

Musharraf or not, the incomming US President will have to worry about what goes on inside the nominal borders of Pakistan much more then the stated preocupation with Afghanistan.

Pakistanis Aided Attack in Kabul, U.S. Officials Say.

By MARK MAZZETTI and ERIC SCHMITT
Published: August 1, 2008, The New York Times.

WASHINGTON — American intelligence agencies have concluded that members of Pakistan’s powerful spy service helped plan the deadly July 7 bombing of India’s embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, according to United States government officials.  The conclusion was based on intercepted communications between Pakistani intelligence officers and militants who carried out the attack, the officials said, providing the clearest evidence to date that Pakistani intelligence officers are actively undermining American efforts to combat militants in the region.

The American officials also said there was new information showing that members of the Pakistani intelligence service were increasingly providing militants with details about the American campaign against them, in some cases allowing militants to avoid American missile strikes in Pakistan’s tribal areas.

Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani of Pakistan visited Washington this week What Was He Told There?

Concerns about the role played by Pakistani intelligence not only has strained relations between the United States and Pakistan, a longtime ally, but also has fanned tensions between Pakistan and its archrival, India. Within days of the bombings, Indian officials accused the Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, of helping to orchestrate the attack in Kabul, which killed 54, including an Indian defense attaché.

American officials said that the communications were intercepted before the July 7 bombing, and that the C.I.A. emissary, Stephen R. Kappes, the agency’s deputy director, had been ordered to Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital, even before the attack. The intercepts were not detailed enough to warn of any specific attack.

The government officials were guarded in describing the new evidence and would not say specifically what kind of assistance the ISI officers provided to the militants. They said that the ISI officers had not been renegades, indicating that their actions might have been authorized by superiors.

“It confirmed some suspicions that I think were widely held,” one State Department official with knowledge of Afghanistan issues said of the intercepted communications. “It was sort of this ‘aha’ moment. There was a sense that there was finally direct proof.”

The information linking the ISI to the bombing of the Indian Embassy was described in interviews by several American officials with knowledge of the intelligence. Some of the officials expressed anger that elements of Pakistan’s government seemed to be directly aiding violence in Afghanistan that had included attacks on American troops.

Some American officials have begun to suggest that Pakistan is no longer a fully reliable American partner and to advocate some unilateral American action against militants based in the tribal areas.

The ISI has long maintained ties to militant groups in the tribal areas, in part to court allies it can use to contain Afghanistan’s power. In recent years, Pakistan’s government has also been concerned about India’s growing influence inside Afghanistan, including New Delhi’s close ties to the government of Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president.

American officials say they believe that the embassy attack was probably carried out by members of a network led by Maulavi Jalaluddin Haqqani, whose alliance with Al Qaeda and its affiliates has allowed the terrorist network to rebuild in the tribal areas.

American and Pakistani officials have now acknowledged that President Bush on Monday confronted Pakistan’s prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, about the divided loyalties of the ISI.

Pakistan’s defense minister, Chaudhry Ahmed Mukhtar, told a Pakistani television network on Wednesday that Mr. Bush asked senior Pakistani officials this week, “ ‘Who is in control of ISI?’ ” and asked about leaked information that tipped militants to surveillance efforts by Western intelligence services.

Pakistan’s new civilian government is wrestling with these very issues, and there is concern in Washington that the civilian leaders will be unable to end a longstanding relationship between members of the ISI and militants associated with Al Qaeda.

Spokesmen for the White House and the C.I.A. declined to comment for this article. Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States, Husain Haqqani, did not return a call seeking comment.

Further underscoring the tension between Pakistan and its Western allies, Britain’s senior military officer said in Washington on Thursday that an American and British program to help train Pakistan’s Frontier Corps in the tribal areas had been delayed while Pakistan’s military and civilian officials sorted out details about the program’s goals.

Britain and the United States had each offered to send about two dozen military trainers to Pakistan later this summer to train Pakistani Army officers who in turn would instruct the Frontier Corps paramilitary forces.

But the British officer, Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup, said the program had been temporarily delayed. “We don’t yet have a firm start date,” he told a small group of reporters. “We’re ready to go.”

The bombing of the Indian Embassy helped to set off a new deterioration in relations between India and Pakistan.

This week, Indian and Pakistani soldiers fired at each other across the Kashmir frontier for more than 12 hours overnight Monday, in what the Indian Army called the most serious violation of a five-year-old cease-fire agreement. The nightlong battle came after one Indian soldier and four Pakistanis were killed along the border between sections of Kashmir that are controlled by India and by Pakistan.

Indian officials say they are equally worried about what is happening on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border because they say the insurgents who are facing off with India in Kashmir and those who target Afghanistan are related and can keep both borders burning at the same time.

India and Afghanistan share close political, cultural and economic ties, and India maintains an active intelligence network in Afghanistan, all of which has drawn suspicion from Pakistani officials.

When asked Thursday about whether the ISI and Pakistani military remained loyal to the country’s civilian government, Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, sidestepped the question. “That’s probably something the government of Pakistan ought to speak to,” Admiral Mullen told reporters at the Pentagon.

Jalaluddin Haqqani, the militia commander, battled Soviet troops during the 1980s and has had a long and complicated relationship with the C.I.A. He was among a group of fighters who received arms and millions of dollars from the C.I.A. during that period, but his allegiance with Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda during the following decade led the United States to sever the relationship.

Mr. Haqqani and his sons now run a network that Western intelligence services say they believe is responsible for a campaign of violence throughout Afghanistan, including the Indian Embassy bombing and an attack on the Serena Hotel in Kabul earlier this year.

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Today on TV, as part of a discussion at the Washington Institute for The Middle East, Shaul Mofaz, The Deputy Prime Minister of Israel, a former Defense Minister and Chief of the Military Staff, was asked why Israel is worried about pre-nuclear Iran, but does not show worry about the nuclear Pakistan?

His answer was that Pakistan is managed by a regime friendly to the US, even though there is the unruliness at the Afghan border, on the other hand Iran is ruled by an enemy elite even though the Iranian people are friendly people. He seemed to trust the government of Pakistan and we really wonder why? We do not think that a man of his past does not see the real facts on the ground - so all what we can conclude is that he sees the facts in Washington and he will not dare to step out from a line-up with the White House. So Quo Vadis Pakistan? And US - just because you helped create the Golem - will you now also continue to talk Afghanistan when it is clear that any solution to the AfghanPakiMess starts with actions in Pakistan.

Fareed Zakaria, on his GPS, the new bright star of CNN TV, had two guests from Europe on his program on Sunday, July 27, 2008 - the writers Bernard Henry Levy, known in France simply as BHL, and Josef Joffe, the editor of Die Zeit.

GHL said flatly, were Obama to run for President of the EU he would get at least 85% of the vote. The Europeans see in him the joint embodiment of the two best figures in recent American history - MLK and JFK - and propelled by a very reasonable mix of realism and idealism. Bringing his impressions to a closer set of images - he sees in Obama someone who has the potential of leading from a mix of the Neocons with Kissinger.

Joe Joffe thought that this week showed Obama as a canvas on which the Europeans projected what they want for America - that is how they want to see it. He also said that McCain, known to the Europeans, has vanished nevertheless from the media in Europe, as he thinks happened also in the US. “He has lost the battle of storytelling’ - he said.

GHL added that in France “we would not elect a President from a minority - so we dream of America.”

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 http://www.nypost.com/seven/07272008/new…

OBAMA’S SECRET RESCUE MISSION
SEEKS TO FREE US MOM’S KIDS FROM PALESTINIAN ‘CAPTIVITY’

By GINGER ADAMS OTIS, New York Post, July 27, 2008

Barack Obama carried out a secret assignment during his global tour last week.
While talking about the Middle East peace process in the West Bank Wednesday, the presumptive Democratic nominee slipped a note to Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad.
The private message: Help an anguished Chicago mother get her daughters back.

Obama detailed the plight of Colleen Bargouthi, 36. She says that for the last year, her four daughters have been held in the Palestinian territories, made to wear headdresses and schooled in Islam by their Muslim father, Yasser Shibli.
Obama asked Fayyad’s help in Colleen’s fight to get her girls home after their Palestinian dad blocked them from returning from what was to be a six-week family trip to his hometown of Ramallah on the West Bank.
“According to Colleen, [her husband] hit her, kept her as a virtual prisoner in her in-laws’ home and menaced her with guns,” the note reads.
The husband promised he “would return the girls if she went home and found a job and a place for the family.
“Yasser Shibli Bargouthi has since told Colleen that her daughters will never be allowed to leave to return to their mother. I would ask that the minister of justice look into this case.”
Obama also asked the US consul general in Jerusalem, Jacob Welles, to investigate and work with Fayyad.
Colleen had taken her case to the Chicago media and met with Obama’s camp. But she was unaware of his efforts until contacted by The Post.
An Obama staffer called Colleen Thursday saying that Fayyad had vowed to look into the situation.
“I can’t believe it. I am so amazed and pleased,” she said.
Colleen could never have imagined the turn of events her life has taken. She was Colleen Davis when she met Yasser, a grocery-store manager, in 1993 through a friend while she worked as a waitress at Midway Airport.
He was a Muslim and she a Baptist, but he told her it was not an issue. She made her religious beliefs clear to his clan and got their blessing before the two married in a Christian ceremony 15 years ago.
Six months later, they traveled to Ramallah and she was welcomed into the family. “I always told him that I was a Christian and would remain one, and that any children we had would be raised Christian,” she says.
The couple settled in a Chicago suburb with her son, Ricky, from a previous marriage and had four daughters, Emily, 11, Hannah, 8, Amanda, 6 and Sarah, 5.
Colleen was a stay-at-home mom and her husband became manager of a cellphone store.
The couple bought a house in 1999 but sold it when they couldn’t make the payments.

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OPINION in The New York Times, Sunday July 27, 2008.

How Obama Became Acting President.

by: Frank Rich, The New York Times

Frank Rich writes about how Barack Obama has become “acting president,” and raises questions about John McCain’s “fitness to be president.”

It almost seems like a gag worthy of “Borat”: A smooth-talking rookie senator with an exotic name passes himself off as the incumbent American president to credulous foreigners. But to dismiss Barack Obama’s magical mystery tour through old Europe and two war zones as a media-made fairy tale would be to underestimate the ingenious politics of the moment. History was on the march well before Mr. Obama boarded his plane, and his trip was perfectly timed to reap the whirlwind.
He never would have been treated as a president-in-waiting by heads of state or network talking heads if all he offered were charisma, slick rhetoric and stunning visuals. What drew them instead was the raw power Mr. Obama has amassed: the power to start shaping events and the power to move markets, including TV ratings. (Even “Access Hollywood” mustered a 20 percent audience jump by hosting the Obama family.) Power begets more power, absolutely.
The growing Obama clout derives not from national polls, where his lead is modest. Nor is it a gift from the press, which still gives free passes to its old bus mate John McCain. It was laughable to watch journalists stamp their feet last week to try to push Mr. Obama into saying he was “wrong” about the surge. More than five years and 4,100 American fatalities later, they’re still not demanding that Mr. McCain admit he was wrong when he assured us that our adventure in Iraq would be fast, produce little American “bloodletting” and “be paid for by the Iraqis.”
Never mind. This election remains about the present and the future, where Iraq’s $10 billion a month drain on American pocketbooks and military readiness is just one moving part in a matrix of national crises stretching from the gas pump to Pakistan. That’s the high-rolling political casino where Mr. Obama amassed the chips he cashed in last week. The “change” that he can at times wield like a glib marketing gimmick is increasingly becoming a substantive reality - sometimes through Mr. Obama’s instigation, sometimes by luck. Obama-branded change is snowballing, whether it’s change you happen to believe in or not.
Looking back now, we can see that the fortnight preceding the candidate’s flight to Kuwait was like a sequence in an old movie where wind blows away calendar pages to announce an epochal plot turn. First, on July 7, the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, dissed Bush dogma by raising the prospect of a withdrawal timetable for our troops. Then, on July 15, Mr. McCain suddenly noticed that more Americans are dying in Afghanistan than Iraq and called for more American forces to be sent there. It was a long-overdue recognition of the obvious that he could no longer avoid: both Robert Gates, the defense secretary, and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had already called for more American troops to battle the resurgent Taliban, echoing the policy proposed by Mr. Obama a year ago.
On July 17 we learned that President Bush, who had labeled direct talks with Iran “appeasement,” would send the No. 3 official in the State Department to multilateral nuclear talks with Iran. Lest anyone doubt that the White House had moved away from the rigid stand endorsed by Mr. McCain and toward Mr. Obama’s, a former Rumsfeld apparatchik weighed in on The Wall Street Journal’s op-ed page: “Now Bush Is Appeasing Iran.”
Within 24 hours, the White House did another U-turn, endorsing an Iraq withdrawal timetable as long as it was labeled a “general time horizon.” In a flash, as Mr. Obama touched down in Kuwait, Mr. Maliki approvingly cited the Democratic candidate by name while laying out a troop-withdrawal calendar of his own that, like Mr. Obama’s, would wind down in 2010. On Tuesday, the British prime minister, Gordon Brown, announced a major drawdown of his nation’s troops by early 2009.
But it’s not merely the foreign policy consensus that is shifting Obama-ward. The Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens has now joined another high-profile McCain supporter, Arnold Schwarzenegger, in knocking the McCain nostrum that America can drill its way out of its energy crisis. Mr. Pickens, who financed the Swift-boat campaign smearing John Kerry in 2004, was thought to be a sugar daddy for similar assaults against the Democrats this year. Instead, he is underwriting nonpartisan ads promoting wind power and speaks of how he would welcome Al Gore as energy czar if there’s an Obama administration.
The Obama stampede is forcing Mr. McCain to surrender on other domestic fronts. After the Democrat ran ads in 14 states berating chief executives who are “making more in 10 minutes” than many workers do in a year, a newly populist Mr. McCain began railing against “corporate greed” - much as he also followed Mr. Obama’s example and belatedly endorsed a homeowners’ bailout he had at first opposed. Given that Mr. McCain has already used a refitted, hand-me-down Obama campaign slogan (”A Leader You Can Believe In”), it can’t be long before he takes up fist bumps. They’ve become the rage among young (nonterrorist) American businessmen, according to USA Today.
“We have one president at a time,” Mr. Obama is careful to say. True, but the sitting president, a lame duck despised by voters and shunned by his own party’s candidates, now has all the gravitas of Mr. Cellophane in “Chicago.” The opening for a successor arrived prematurely, and the vacuum had been waiting to be filled. What was most striking about the Obama speech in Berlin was not anything he said so much as the alternative reality it fostered: many American children have never before seen huge crowds turn out abroad to wave American flags instead of burn them.
Mr. McCain could also have stepped into the leadership gap left by Mr. Bush’s de facto abdication. His inability to even make a stab at doing so is troubling. While drama-queen commentators on television last week were busy building up false suspense about the Obama trip - will he make a world-class gaffe? will he have too large an audience in Germany? - few focused on the alarms that Mr. McCain’s behavior at home raise about his fitness to be president.
Once again the candidate was making factual errors about the only subject he cares about, imagining an Iraq-Pakistan border and garbling the chronology of the Anbar Awakening. Once again he displayed a tantrum-prone temperament ill-suited to a high-pressure 21st-century presidency. His grim-faced crusade to brand his opponent as a traitor who wants to “lose a war” isn’t even a competent impersonation of Joe McCarthy. Mr. McCain comes off instead like the ineffectual Mr. Wilson, the retired neighbor perpetually busting a gasket at the antics of pesky little Dennis the Menace.
The week’s most revealing incident occurred on Wednesday when the new, supposedly improved McCain campaign management finalized its grand plan to counter Mr. Obama’s Berlin speech with a “Mission Accomplished”-like helicopter landing on an oil rig off Louisiana’s coast. The announcement was posted on politico.com even as any American with a television could see that Hurricane Dolly was imminent. Needless to say, this bit of theater was almost immediately “postponed” but not before raising the question of whether a McCain administration would be just as hapless in anticipating the next Katrina as the Bush-Brownie storm watch.
When not plotting such stunts, the McCain campaign whines about its lack of press attention like a lover jilted for a younger guy. The McCain camp should be careful what it wishes for. As its relentless goading of Mr. Obama to visit Iraq only ratcheted up anticipation for the Democrat’s triumphant trip, so its insistent demand for joint town-hall meetings with Mr. Obama and for more televised chronicling of Mr. McCain’s wanderings could be self-inflicted disasters in the making.
Mr. McCain may be most comfortable at town-hall meetings before largely friendly crowds, but his performance under pressure at this year’s G.O.P. primary debates was erratic. His sound-bite-deep knowledge of the country’s No. 1 issue, the economy, is a Gerald Ford train wreck waiting to happen in any matchup with Mr. Obama that requires focused, time-limited answers rather than rambling.
During Mr. McCain’s last two tours of the Middle East - conducted without the invasive scrutiny of network anchors - the only news he generated was his confusion of Sunni with Shia and his embarrassing stroll through a “safe” Baghdad market with helicopter cover. He should thank his stars that few TV viewers saw that he was even less at home when walking through a chaotic Pennsylvania supermarket last week. He inveighed against the price of milk while reading from a note card and felt the pain of a shopper planted by the local Republican Party.
The election remains Mr. Obama’s to lose, and he could lose it, whether through unexpected events, his own vanity or a vice-presidential misfire. But what we’ve learned this month is that America, our allies and most likely the next Congress are moving toward Mr. Obama’s post-Iraq vision of the future, whether he reaches the White House or not. That’s some small comfort as we contemplate the strange alternative offered by the Republicans: a candidate so oblivious to our nation’s big challenges ahead that he is doubling down in his campaign against both Mr. Maliki and Mr. Obama to be elected commander in chief of the surge.

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OPINION In The New York Times, Friday July 25, 2008.

Bush’s Puppets. { or Quo Vadis Stephen Johnson? Did You Forget Your Federal Oath To Have a Non-Partisan EPA? }
by: Bill Becker, Climate Progress*

According to Bill Becker of the Presidential Climate Action Project, EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson has neglected his federal oath to “well and faithfully discharge the duties” of his office by repeatedly allowing the Bush White House to manipulate environmental decisions and undermine action necessary to address climate change. (Photo: Getty Images)

EPA administrator Stephen Johnson neglects his federal oath.
Some of us had high hopes for Stephen Johnson when President Bush appointed him in March 2005 as administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Johnson was not a former oil-industry lobbyist or Halliburton executive. He was a career civil servant who had been with the federal government for 24 years. He was a scientist, not a political hack, and he had served under both Democrat and Republican presidents.
I could relate, although my federal career was the reverse of Johnson’s.
I started as a political appointee under President George H.W. Bush, then served the next 15 years as a careerist at the Department of Energy. During that time, I learned that there are a lot of good feds out there - people who work hard and take risks for what they believe is in the public’s best interest. It requires backbone at times to resist improper political pressures and to carry out the oath of office that federal employees take, promising to “well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.”
It now appears that Johnson is not fulfilling that oath. There’s new evidence that he has allowed the White House to usurp his duty to enforce one of the nation’s most important environmental laws, the Clean Air Act. Under the Act, it is the Administrator of EPA, not the president, who is the decider on enforcement issues. The president does not have the legal authority to dictate what those decisions will be.
But that’s not the way the game is played in this Administration. From time to time, we get a glimpse back stage to see that President Bush, Vice President Cheney and their deputies are pulling the strings in a show of raw petro-politics, the law and the contrary advice of experts notwithstanding.
One such glimpse came this week from former EPA official Jason Burnett — an admitted and unrepentant Democrat. Burnett told Congress that Johnson allowed the White House to overrule him on California’s request for a waiver under the Clean Air Act. The waiver would have allowed the state to implement its own standards for greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles, in excess of those set by the federal government.
The Clean Air Act specifically allows California to be more aggressive than the federal government on matters like this, so long as the Administrator grants a waiver. Once California is given the go-ahead, other states are allowed to adopt its standards. Seventeen states indicated they would adopt the California standard for vehicle emissions once Johnson signed the waiver.
Instead, Johnson denied the request in February 2008 after sitting on it for nearly three years, an unusual outcome given that EPA had approved all 50 of California’s previous waiver applications over the last 40 years.
The denial was Johnson’s right under the law, assuming it was his decision and was based soundly on the criteria established by the Act. But Burnett says that Johnson originally intended to grant the waiver, believing it was justified until he was overruled by the White House.
As Robert Sussman of the Center for American Progress has pointed out, this is not the first time that Johnson has pushed key environmental decisions into EPA’s black hole or has overruled the recommendations of his former colleagues among the agency’s scientists and professional staff. Sussman documents other decisions by Johnson that raise “disturbing questions about his ability to carry out the spirit and letter of the nation’s environmental laws and his acquiescence in a White House political agenda seemingly bent on blocking the agency from taking action compelled by court decisions and long-standing Clean Air Act precedents.”
The most significant of these has been EPA and White House stalling tactics on climate action since the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling last year that the agency has the authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. To trigger the regulatory process, all Johnson has to do is to declare that greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare - an obvious conclusion based both on the Court’s decision and on an overwhelming body of scientific evidence.
Nevertheless, 16 months after the Supreme Court ruling, EPA announced earlier this month that it would not proceed with regulation while Bush is still in office.
But back to the California waiver: Last January, Johnson told a congressional committee under oath that “I made the decision” to deny California’s request. Burnett’s latest testimony indicates otherwise. When a House subcommittee asked Johnson for the real story last May, he refused to talk about his conversations with the White House, claiming executive privilege.
In case there has been any doubt, Burnett’s testimony supports the case that public officials such as Johnson (along with the parade of other Administration officials who have recently declared executive privilege or acute amnesia) are merely puppets of the West Wing, even when Congress has delegated them direct responsibility to administer the law.
And in case there has been any doubt, the plot of the puppet-show was made transparent by other Administration decisions in recent days. One lifted the ban imposed by Bush’s father on offshore oil production. In another, just announced, the Department of Interior released draft rules to pave the way for oil shale production on public lands in the West. Congress has placed a moratorium on final oil-shale rules, but the moratorium is scheduled to expire on Oct. 1. Interior Secretary Dick Kempthorne is quoted as saying he’ll move swiftly to make the rules final when the moratorium expires.
Oil shale production would be a disaster of several dimensions. It is extremely energy and water intensive, and its use would be another major setback to the goal of reducing the nation’s carbon emissions. Oil shale production would divert precious water from Western cities and farms, creating another fuel-or-food problem, and sink more money and time into another questionable carbon-intensive resource that will make meaningful climate action more difficult and expensive, if not impossible.
There’s no mystery here. The White House is blocking action on climate change while setting the stage for the oil industry to feed America’s addiction to that carbon-intensive fuel for many years to come.
With only six months left on stage, the puppet masters are hard at work. It’s a disappointment that someone like Johnson, who has made public service his career, is allowing his integrity to be destroyed by a president who shows little regard for him, the nation’s long-term welfare, or the law.
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 * Bill Becker is executive director of the Presidential Climate Action Project, an initiative to help the next President of the United States take decisive action on global warming and energy security in his or her first 100 days in office.

Obama Arrives in Baghdad to Discuss Iraq Strategy.

By Sudarsan Raghavan and Debbi Wilgoren, Washington Post Foreign Service.
Monday, July 21, 2008; 11:20 AM

BAGHDAD, July 21 — Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama arrived in Iraq Monday morning to discuss U.S.-Iraq strategy and American troop levels, issues that have become a cornerstone of debate in the U.S. presidential campaign.

But after meeting for nearly an hour with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and other top U.S. and Iraqi officials, Obama declined to say what they had talked about.

“We had a very constructive discussion,” the Illinois senator and presumptive Democratic nominee said before ducking back into a heavily guarded Chevrolet Suburban to head to his next meeting, with Iraqi President Jalal Talabani. “I’ll be providing details later during my visit.”

Obama is traveling as part of a congressional delegation that includes Sens. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) and Jack Reed (D-R.I.), both critics of the war. But in many ways — from the red carpet rolled out for the group at Maliki’s residence to his seat of honor next to Maliki during a brief photo opportunity — he is being treated like a visiting head of state.

The delegation began its trip with two days in Afghanistan, then flew to Kuwait, where the three senators met with Kuwait’s emir, Sabah Ahmed al-Sabah, and other senior officials, according to the official Kuwait News Agency. In Iraq, they will meet with top U.S. and Iraqi officials and military commanders, including Army Gen. David H. Petraeus.

This article we write as a response to two OP-ED page articles that appeared in the New York Times of July 17, 2008, and we felt that both these articles were nothing but technical reactions to what goes on in the real world and as such they actually missed the main point of what they were writing about.

I am giving here the references to those articles and let me present my argument.

The US is still truly the only present-day super-power, as such the President of the US is in effect still King-of-the-World for his time in office - albeit because of the realities of a globalized world this is coming to an end.
It is the stubbornness of President Bush to continue to rely on petroleum from afar as the energy input to the world economy that has rapidly sent-off the US to more and more of a diminished stature. having said this, at least for another 20 years, the President of the US will still be King of the global zoo.
But as the acts of the US President impact so much more people then the people of the US, these other people should also be entitled to express what they would expect from a US President.
But why should one really look at this with disdain? With a little more charm, the US could actually be encouraged to assume global leadership - the fact that this has not happened is not because of the rising powers - the likes of China, India and Brazil, but rather because of the remnant of the old leaders that run countries like the US, Russia and Germany. These are people that still remember the Cold War that positiond a US led West against a Soviet bloc, and Angela Merkel is indeed the lady that experienced those times and she looks at George W. Bush as the embodiment of the Kennedy-Reagan dynasty that can stand up to the Putin-Medvedev regime at Europe’s border.
That is the soil from which grew the Christoph Peters article.

On the other hand, the Michael I. Meyerson article, written by a Professor of Law, delves into the legalities of a US that came about by freeing itself from the oppression of the British Crown and made thus sure that no foreign-born will assume American leadership. We think this was a bit Shakespearean in the sense we encounter in Macbeth. Even there the villain was a regular local boy and the trees that came to the fortress were from his countryside. Anyway, as the Professor says - we must accept the law - shut up or put up. If we do not get to change the law, if an Einstein comes along we will still have to accept a Bush.

OK, so what do I complain about? The answer is simple - even within the limitations that Professor Meyerson makes clear, and which get loosened for a McCain born abroad from US parents on National mission, the reality today is that the US Presidency has a huge impact today with the PEOPLE of the world, and not just with their governments. Even though the stature of the US has been largely diminished during the Bush eight years in power, and many governments now thumb their noses in the face of the US - the likes of North Korea, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Libya, Zimbabwe, South Africa…..the list is growing, yet the people in those countries are actually looking up to the United States as a model of what they would like to be when they grow up. So, it is imperative, if the US wants to improve its IMMAGE abroad, the President must make sure that he also has the backing of the people ABROAD and not just the people in the US.

As a point of information, nobody yet talks about this in the written press, but these days the basketball National team of Iran, that will be competing in the Olympics after they won the Asian championship, is now touring US campuses and just had their game at the University of Ohio. I understand that these very tall young Iranians have only praise for the US teams and we can assume that their faith in Ahmedi-Nejad has been shaken somewhat. We know that Senator Obama cannot go and speak to the Iranian people in front of the remains of the Cyrus palace, he is going to Kabul, Baghdad, and Ramallah and will not be able to speak to the people of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Palestine. He will just speak to Americans in those locations, and this will be thus only for American consumption. Let me say that this will not be much of a learning experience - he will learn there as little as McCain did when touring in the center of 100 bodyguards when he declared that Iraq was safe for him. The best Obama will be able to say that his trip was made safe by the Americans and therefore time has come to declare victory and look for energy in our own wind, water, sun, soil and air - the elements that nature allowed us to work with.

OK, so what am I saying? Obama will continue to Jordan, Israel, Germany, France and the UK. I would hate to see him endanger his safety at a mob scene in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem or Amman, but when it comes to Berlin, Paris, London that is something else, and here we get to the Christoph Peters article.

I would love to see 100.000 or even one million Germans waving German and US flags listening to the now famous Obama oratory - right there at the Brandenburg Gate - call it Berlin III if you wish - this after the Kennedy and Reagan previous pep-talks. Who will come out there will be the German people who actually have little in common with their East-German product Chancellor. The German people who do not like the Bushes do love US leadership when it is in the hands of a promising new fresh face. They want to hear what he has to say and this will become the ice-breaker for the US present isolation.

The people are no diplomats - they are allowed to be honest. What Angela Merkel was afraid off is not the wrath of one outgoing George W. Bush, but of the multitude of her own people who did not forget her trying to play second fiddle when she could have known better. But really - Merkel is not the issue here - the issue is a new US under a potential new President who will have the chance to say this time much more then “Ich bin ein Berliner” - he will be able to say if he can pull himself to say this in plain language: I SEE BEFORE ME THE CHALLENGES OF A NEW WORLD - THE BEGINNING OF A POST-PETROLEUM ECONOMY - AND I AM WITH YOU IN THE EFFORT TO BUILD THIS NEW WORLD. I PROMISE YOU AND AMERICA THAT WE WILL TAKE ACTIONS TOGETHER, AND WE WILL HAVE NEW PROSPERITY THAT WILL COME FROM SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT BASED ON RELIANCE ON RENEWABLE SOURCES OF ENERGY. The Europeans at least will hear that there is a future even in a globalized world. If nothing else, there is still a chance for a Trans-Atlantic Union as it was in the Kennedy and Reagan days. This will allow the world of the future to have three One-billion-pluss people groupings/economies and the formation of a leadership that can handle this by agreements, rather then by competition that explodes in proxy wars.

God willing, with a million in attendance at the Gate, if Sarcozy, does the same for him on Champs Elise, and Brown allows for the Hide Park Gardens - this will have impact on the chronically deficient US electorate. The folks back home in Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Florida, will see that the US does not have to be retired yet, and that the face of this best product of an integrated America is the face that the world was waiting for. Are we into an American Messianic Age that comes after eight years of self-destruction?

 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/17/opinio…

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR to The New York Times
Obama at the Gate, CHRISTOPH PETERS, Published: July 17, 2008, from Berlin.

Thilo Rothacker

“ANGELA MERKEL, Germany’s chancellor, has made known her displeasure at the possibility that Barack Obama might use an appearance before the Brandenburg Gate here to present himself to the world as a politician of balance and integrity. Such an event would doubtless be heavy with symbolism as well as heavily attended, and one should always be wary meddling in another nation’s elections.

Yet Ch