Grumbling for the sake of grumbling.

Sorry to say that the blogging drought isn't gonna let up anytime soon (though I'm actually enjoying the work that's the proximate cause) - but I did want to break silence long enough to flag one recent bit from Glenn Greenwald. I've been quite happy with Team Obama so far (the collapse of the economic world order notwithstanding), but his Justice Department is tarnishing itself pretty badly with this crap.

Let there be sunlight, by God!

And on that note I go back to the mines.

Potentially extremely good news from Iraq.

Sorry for the latest round of silence; between work and stomach flu and flu flu, the last week has been more tense than I would've preferred. [And, fair warning: I don't know that this week is promising to be a whole lot better.] All of that said, I want to point to this bit and acknowledge that my inner pessimist is somewhat stunned. I'm still really worried about the politics of the Kurdish north, but the idea that demagogic warlordism may actually be in decline in the country as a whole is a thing better than anything for which I dared hope a year ago.

Drive-by nitpicking.

Richard Cohen has a particularly galling piece in the Post today arguing in favor of a prosecution-free truth commission system to get to the bottom of torture in the Bush years. Since I concur that that's likely to be the best we can get - since the bulk of the responsibility rests with figures who'll never, ever be dragged before an American court of law - you'd think that I'd let bygones be bygones and gloss over the points in which Cohen is being obtuse and/or disingenuous. And I probably would!

It's just that his icy contempt for people who have cleaner hands than his own is really ticking me off. [Plus, I'm sick, and in something of a bad mood anyway.]

So, a few points: first, one of the strengths of our constitution as it was designed is that it's meant to stand immune - or at least resistant - to the vicissitudes of public opinion, particularly when individual rights are at stake. Anyone who says with a straight face that torture (in some cases the torture of innocent people) shouldn't be prosecuted because lots of Americans were really afraid at the time the policy was enacted and sincerely thought that torture was appropriate is setting up a lovely umbrella argument for anti-immigrant violence from coast to coast.

Second, the fact that everyone Cohen hung with in early `02 may have been down with beating the crap out of captive prisoners doesn't mean he gets to accuse America as a whole of being hypocritical in finding torture unpalatable now. I'd argue it means instead that he needs a wider (and preferably more humane) group of friends and sources.

Third, okay, maybe it is unfair to prosecute torturers when the people who make policy go unscathed. That said, there's a lot to be said for setting some institutional precedent down - isn't there at least an argument to be had that there might be some positive value in teaching future generations of spooks that it might just be in their own best interests to refuse to carry out orders that are clearly contrary to the spirit of American law? It seems like a point that shouldn't just be shrugged away, even if one disagrees.

I'm just sick of people urging me to remember what irrational fear felt like.

It really is a different world.

US President Barack Obama promised to work towards a "durable peace" in the Middle East during a phone call to Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas on Wednesday, Palestinian officials said.

Obama called the Palestinian leader a day after taking the oath of office and assured him that he intended "to work with him as partners to establish a durable peace in the region," Abbas's spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeina told AFP.

Obama told Abbas that the president was the first foreign leader he called since taking office, Rudeina said.

"This is my first phone call to a foreign leader and I'm making it only hours after I took office," Rudeina quoted Obama as telling Abbas.

Yes, yes. It's only symbolism.

Still: holy crap.

The new guy.

As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience's sake. And so to all other peoples and governments who are watching today, from the grandest capitals to the small village where my father was born: know that America is a friend of each nation and every man, woman, and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity, and that we are ready to lead once more.

I'm not as exuberant today as I was in the approach to it; the stock market took a hit, Ted Kennedy's back in the hospital, and all the world's impossible tasks are coming back into focus. Even if Obama's everything I want him to be - and, of course, that's not gonna prove to be the case - getting him into office is barely the end of the beginning of the great generational slog.

That said, I can't even begin to describe what a relief it is to be able to cut and paste passages like the one above and then to say that they came from the President of the United States.

One thing about the Bush administration . . .

Now that it's done, I don't think I can overstate the extent to which it - by its crimes and errors - informed and fed my sense of myself as an American, rather than as a more nebulously defined global citizen. If the cost weren't so horrifically high, I might even be tempted to be grateful; giving me a kind of adversarial context in which to test and explore my views on public ethics and appropriate policy forced me, in my own mind, to clarify positions that had always been vague and even a bit unsteady in more morally comfortable years.

All told, though, that's one sorry-ass silver lining to all those years of decay and shame - to say nothing of the environmental damage that was done along the way.

Good riddance.

I (belatedly) wonder if Ehud Olmert is on drugs.

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was left shame-faced after President George W. Bush ordered her to abstain in a key UN vote on the Gaza war, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said on Monday.

"She was left shamed. A resolution that she prepared and arranged, and in the end she did not vote in favour," Olmert said in a speech in the southern town of Ashkelon.

The UN Security Council passed a resolution last Thursday calling for an immediate ceasefire in the three-week-old conflict in the Gaza Strip and an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza where hundreds have been killed.

Fourteen of the council's 15 members voted in favour of the resolution, which was later rejected by both Israel and Hamas.

The United States, Israel's main ally, had initially been expected to voted in line with the other 14 but Rice later became the sole abstention.

"In the night between Thursday and Friday, when the secretary of state wanted to lead the vote on a ceasefire at the Security Council, we did not want her to vote in favour," Olmert said.

"I said 'get me President Bush on the phone'. They said he was in the middle of giving a speech in Philadelphia. I said I didn't care. 'I need to talk to him now'. He got off the podium and spoke to me.

"I told him the United States could not vote in favour. It cannot vote in favour of such a resolution. He immediately called the secretary of state and told her not to vote in favour."

That's the Prime Minister of Israel, publicly gloating about humiliating the U.S. Secretary of State and dictating policy to the hapless president. One might take that as a sign of his state of mind almost three weeks into the Gaza offensive - playing to the domestic hardcore, rather full of himself, and not terribly mindful of the fact that his actions don't seem to be aimed at any clear and beneficial end.

But he's clearly enjoying being able to swagger a bit after the last few years of ineptitude and scandal.

Another mess for the Israeli Supreme Court to clean up.

Israel's Central Election Committee banned all Arab parties from participating in February's elections today, as part of a desperate effort to retroactively strip away as much strategic legitimacy from the assault on Gaza as possible by making allegations of outright racism that much harder to refute.

Meanwhile, Ha'aretz has now called for the cessation of hostilities. It's something, at least.

Mea culpa.

Long-time readers of the Wall will probably recall that I spent most of 2007 and 2008 grappling with a recurring worry that the Cheneyites were in ascent and that open hostilities with Iran were never less than extremely likely.

My fears, happily, were not borne out.

And, in fact, the Times is now reporting that President Bush personally squashed plans for an Israeli attack in `08. To be clear, there were a lot of good reasons for abstaining from any such strikes - both political, once the 2007 NIE made a nuclear Iran seem like a less than imminent threat, and practical - but I didn't think the Bush administration had the good sense to recognize those reasons, and I gave the most prominent players a lot of grief on this blog (not that they'd particularly care) as a result.

I'm delighted to have been embarrassingly wrong.

Random Gaza quote.

If we want to argue that Israel will have to deal with Hamas, cannot pulverize it at gunpoint, cannot "eliminate" it, and indeed heightens its prestige by piling up the bodies of civilians whether they are deliberately targeted or not--and I don't know any alternative in the real world to dealing with them as a political force--we mustn't think we can win the argument cheaply by pretending that it will be easy. It will not be easy. It's only necessary.

Todd Gitlin.

Undoing Ledbetter.

It's about time.

Cui bono?

It's clearly not the people of Gaza, but it's not looking like Israel and its regional allies, either.

As the war in Gaza burned through its 14th day, Arab governments have felt their legitimacy challenged with an uncommon virulence. With each passing day, and each Palestinian death, the popularity of Hamas and other radical movements has ratcheted higher on the Arab street, while the standing of Arab leaders has suffered.

Nowhere in the Arab world is the gap between the street and the government so wide as here in Egypt, which has a peace treaty with Israel and has refused to allow free passage of goods and people through its border with Gaza, a decision that has been attacked by Islamic and Arab leaders and proved deeply troubling to many Egyptians. And so the government of President Hosni Mubarak appeared to lean back on its standard formula for preserving authority at Friday Prayer, relying on its security forces to keep calm on the street and government religious institutions like Al Azhar to try to appease public sentiment, in this case by lashing out at the Jews in response to Gaza.

Obviously, Egyptian domestic politics are a major factor here as well; the Mubarak regime is unpopular and authoritarian all on its own, and an ascendant Hamas in Gaza represents both a direct threat and - insofar as it makes other Islamist groups (i.e., the Muslim Brotherhood) look good - an indirect threat as well. Conversely, opposing the Israeli alliance against Hamas is a relatively mild (and therefore relatively safe) way for Egyptian citizens to express some hostility to the policies of their own powers that be. [At least, that's how it starts out.] Anyway, there are metapolitical factors here that the Israelis simply can't control, and I'm not pretending otherwise.

But, regardless, the assault on Gaza comes at a cost of regional support for diplomacy as well as a cost in human life - and at this point I think my pessimism about Israel's chances of getting anything good in return is fairly well established.

The inevitable caveat.

Or, if not caveat, a possible flash of silver lining - Ezra Klein has made the very reasonable observation that calamitous financial news at least improves the political leverage of people who have useful and necessary changes in mind, and more power to him for having done so.

Obviously, though, the caveat to the caveat is that the Republicans in Congress are, by and large, far more radicalized than they were in the immediate aftermath of Clinton's election (the Gingrich hordes didn't arrive at their Contract and sweep into office until `94, IIRC). Worse still, the Democratic leadership is in some cases pretty heavily insulated from the pain, and far more respectful of the institutional roadblocks available to the minority party than it probably should be. Leverage is only meaningful insofar as it's actually utilized.

More than half a million jobs lost in December.

The closest thing to good news I can point to today is Obama's admission that he's aware of Paul Krugman's concerns about the stimulus package; an optimist might dare to hope that the ensuing silence on Krugman's blog indicates that the professor is indeed pulling together the most persuasive argument he can make - but, of course, there's no way to know.

There's also some indication that the Obama administration is gonna do more creative things with TARP (or the remainder thereof) than had been popularly assumed, and . . . well, that would be really reassuring were I not fairly confident that the more highly esteemed alarmists hadn't forgotten that that money was in the mix.

Bleah. Just a dismal day.

What my super-genius friends are up to.

Not naming any names, but . . . well, one of them went and revolutionized telecommunications again. As I understand it, there's no official date for release for the sleek doohicky at hand - it's gotta undergo a love-in at the FCC first - but I gather it's reasonably safe to assume that it'll be out in the U.S. by summer.

Also? I hear it'll give you super powers.

Oh, for heaven's sake.

If this is to be believed, the Bushies seem determined to remain embarrassing to the country to the very end.

Paul Krugman says we're doomed.

Or, more to the point, he thinks the current stimulus plan isn't going to be up to the job. Super.

That said, I caught a bit of Obama on Rachel Maddow tonight, and he seemed to suggest that he thought funding might be added to the plan as it works its way through Congress - which, okay, seems counterintuitive. On the other hand, the guy's better at politics than I am, so . . . well, wait and see.

Reading the tea leaves in Israel.

According to Aluf Benn in Ha'aretz, Obama's recent comments expressing concern for civilian life seem to have been received as something between a masterfully pointed epigram and a gun to the head by the powers that be in Tel Aviv:

The announcement from the Bush White House that for the time being Israel could carry on its offensive was little consolation. Obama made it clear that starting on January 20 the rules of American involvement in the region will change, and his administration will be a lot more active in pushing the diplomatic process between Israel and the Arabs forward.

Obama's timing, after the strike on the school, signals the direction the U.S. will turn in its attitude to the region: It will support Israel, but will oppose any harming of Palestinian civilians. This means that Israel will find it difficult to close the crossings into the Gaza Strip at will.

Senior officials in Jerusalem said yesterday that Israel has two to four days, at most, for this operation. The talks of the political leadership yesterday also revolved around the question of how Israel should end the operation.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert would like a diplomatic agreement that will center on countering the smuggling into the Strip. The problem is that Egypt is unwilling to be party to an agreement that will lay the responsibility at its feet, and is opposed to the deployment of foreign observers on its soil. Cairo is also worried that Israel is trying to dump the Gaza Strip on Egypt, by opening the Rafah crossing. So far the American efforts to promote a deal through Egypt are stuck.

Defense Minister Ehud Barak said that Israel should hold direct talks with Egypt to reach a tacit agreement on preventing smuggling. Israel would agree to a bolstered Egyptian presence in the Sinai peninsula - and President Hosni Mubarak invited Israel to talks on improving the current security arrangements.

Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni is concerned that a diplomatic agreement may be imposed on Israel - which would elevate Hamas, equating it to a sovereign state like Israel. Livni favors a unilateral withdrawal from Gaza the minute the IDF says its mission is completed.

So, apparently the end is in sight.

No matter what the Israelis do, of course, what's left of Hamas will claim victory for just having survived; for all that the Israeli forces were very disciplined in keeping their mission objectives vague, the scale of the Gaza incursion is such that it can't help but be susceptible to a kind of maximalist spin. Maybe tighter border controls will be imposed, but I don't have a lot of faith that the quality of anyone's life will be a whole lot better in eight months.

Except, perhaps, for the masterminds (such as they are) behind al-Qaeda.

Tell me again how this is supposed to cost Hamas popular and international support.

The way this is set up politically means that Israel has to have a ceasefire imposed on it - this seems to be what Defense minister Barak is looking for and he favored the French proposal for a truce last week even before the ground invasion began. The speculation among Israeli commentators is that an international demand for a ceasefire is pretty much the only exit strategy Israel has up its sleeve, even suggesting that Israel may intentionally exacerbate a humanitarian crisis in order to force the international community to act (that was the expert analysis on Israeli channel 10 TV last night). Things are made even more complicated by the fact two of the ministers leading the country are competing in the elections next month - MoD Barak and FM Livni. So it's not just Israel that needs a winning narrative - each minister needs his/her own particular winning narrative. So an outside push is a prerequisite for ending this.

Makes sense.

Bombing a U.N. school might help them out there.

Seriously, there's been a robust dialogue between a great many American bloggers about whether this constitutes a just war, and whether arguments for proportionality are themselves moral, and the more I read the more I pull out what's left of my hair. Insofar as combat here strikes me as being fundamentally destructive to Israel's long-term security interests, the question of the legitimacy of the grievance strikes me as being almost beside the point. How can military action be ethically defensible if it's ultimately pointless?

Full disclosure: I never thought that Israeli deterrence was hugely undermined by the 2006 fiasco - Olmert's reputation as a strategic thinker was in the toilet, true, but that's not the same thing as saying that Israel's military capabilities were suddenly exposed as hollow. Yes, there's a threat inherent in the reputedly expanding range of Hamas weaponry, but the current operation doesn't seem to address that problem in any definitive way at all - if anything, I'd expect that it'll make the borders even more porous over the next several months, and the population of Gaza even more hostile.

It's just frustrating. I don't see what long-term objectives - beyond possibly making a bunch of politicians feel tough for a few weeks - this assault is meant to further, and yet the humanitarian cost is already appallingly high.

Ackerman on Gaza.

The invasion of Gaza has begun. As the bombardment of Gaza has failed to break Palestinian "will," now the gamble is that ground troops will. According to Ha'aretz, a significant portion of Israeli "top commanders" dissented from the decision to invade, arguing that the airstrikes had already dealt Hamas a "heavy blow" and that Israeli casualties could be heavy as well. Clearly they shared the concern that Israel was escalating the war without regard for strategy. How will Israel de-escalate? How can it invade Gaza on the empty goal to engage in an "all-out war" with Hamas and plausibly leave before that unfulfillable end-state is achieved? How can Israeli commanders and politicians who believe a war is going well be persuaded to back down before they commit hubristic blunders that decimate the people of Gaza and make sustainable peace and security less achievable?

This is a plea for what amounts at this point to cynicism. Israel should arbitrarily declare victory and get the hell out of Gaza. Hamas will claim victory too. But it was always going to claim victory, and every hour Israel is in Gaza pummeling them without destroying them is an hour that Hamas will be able to claim that more plausibly, just like Hezbollah did in 2006. That's how these types of asymmetric wars work; and also why it's better for the larger party not to launch them. Israel may not want to hear this now, but it's playing on Hamas' strategic terms. Stepping back is the truer "success" at this point.

It's a couple of days old, but still convincing - and, by the way, it came from here.