The Myth of 11-Dimensional Chess.

“Obama supporters are eager to depict the White House as nothing more than a helpless victim in all of this — the President so deeply wanted a more progressive bill but was sadly thwarted in his noble efforts by those inhumane, corrupt Congressional ‘centrists.’ Right. The evidence was overwhelming from the start that the White House was not only indifferent, but opposed, to the provisions most important to progressives. The administration is getting the bill which they, more or less, wanted from the start — the one that is a huge boon to the health insurance and pharmaceutical industry.“

A day after Senate Democrats kill Byron Dorgan’s non-importation amendment in order to preserve the administration’s back-door deal with Big Pharma, the indispensable Glenn Greenwald takes the Obama administration to task for the final Senate product on health care, which, suffice to say, is looking pretty far afield from the House bill. (And all the while, the bought and paid for Joe Lieberman grins like the Cheshire Cat.)

I was going to wait until year-in-review post week to put this up, but now’s as good a time as any: From civil liberties to this Senate health care fiasco, it’s hard to think of any arena where this administration’s first year hasn’t been a tremendous disappointment. (Regarding the former: I didn’t mention this here earlier, but the brazen audacity of this passage from the president’s war-is-peace Nobel Prize speech made me blanch: “We lose ourselves when we compromise the very ideals that we fight to defend. And we honor — we honor those ideals by upholding them not when it’s easy, but when it is hard.” Uh, your Justice Department is not upholding them, remember? Is the president even aware of his own civil liberties record?)

Anyway, I keep being reminded of this line from my Obama endorsement of January 2008: “There’s a possibility — maybe even a strong possibility — that he’ll end up a Tommy Carcetti-like president: a well-meaning reformer outmatched and buffeted to and fro by the entrenched forces arrayed against him.” Well, welcome to the Carcetti presidency, y’all. The only surprise so far for many of us is in how little he’s actually even tried to enact meaningful reforms. But I guess once the president surrounded himself with the exact same GOP-lite people we’d spent months trying to defeat in the Democratic primary, the writing should have been on the wall. This will not be change we can believe in. A New Day is not dawning. And the president is not really with us — We’re going to have to do the heavy lifting for reform next year without him.

Doubling Down in Kabul.

“First, there are those who suggest that Afghanistan is another Vietnam. They argue that it cannot be stabilized and we are better off cutting our losses and rapidly withdrawing. Yet this argument depends upon a false reading of history. Unlike Vietnam, we are joined by a broad coalition of 43 nations that recognizes the legitimacy of our action. Unlike Vietnam, we are not facing a broad-based popular insurgency.

And most importantly, unlike Vietnam, the American people were viciously attacked from Afghanistan and remain a target for those same extremists who are plotting along its border. To abandon this area now — and to rely only on efforts against al-Qaeda from a distance — would significantly hamper our ability to keep the pressure on al-Qaeda and create an unacceptable risk of additional attacks on our homeland and our allies.”

This is a bit late by now, but regardless: As you all know, President Obama made the case last week for sending 30,000 more troops in Afghanistan. At this point — and like Fred Kaplan — I’m conflicted about our continued involvement there…but I’m leaning toward withdrawal. Everything I’ve heard about the war lately has had that “Vietnam in ’66” sense to it: A corrupt government as our ally; trouble winning “hearts and minds”; The US stepping half-blindly into a conflict that’s been simmering for centuries (in Southeast Asia, it was the endless Vietnamese war against interlopers; here it’s long-simmering ethnic rivalries between the Pashtuns and everyone else.) And now, our new progressive-minded president tells us: If we just commit X more troops (where, now X=30,000), we can win, close up shop, and go home. Uh, really? I think I’ve already seen this movie a few times.

Obama’s shout-out above to basically token international support doesn’t assuage my fears. And, as far as the threat posed by Vietnam: True, Tonkin never happened, but obviously policymakers of that era were less sanguine about a Communist victory in South Vietnam than we are today — The threat of the Enemy can always gets unduly amplified in the heat of the moment. (Speaking of said Reds, it should sober us to acknowledge that all we’ve done so far in Afghanistan is basically manage to re-create the Soviet experience in the region. Iirc, that didn’t end so well.)

Al Qaeda is in Afghanistan, yes, and if we could weed them out and destroy their capacity to attack again, all the better. (And always remember: If Dubya, Rummy et al had just finished the job properly in 2002 rather than salivating over Iraq, we would be in a lot better position right now.) But Al Qaeda is also in Somalia, Tajikstan, Yemen, the Philippines, Kosovo…all over the place. We don’t have the resources to play whack-a-mole in all these nations anymore, particularly when every whack usually just works to create new moles. (You’d think we learn that the Hydra sprouts two more heads every time you cut off the wrong one.)

The biggest argument in favor of increasing our military position in Afghanistan would be the continued stability of neighboring Pakistan. (There’s Vietnam again — it’s another variation of the Domino Theory.) But, there’s a good amount of evidence to suggest that more troop increases by us will only inflame the situation and further destabilize Pakistan. In which case, I’m not sure what we’re doing over there, and what we could possibly accomplish in 18 months that we haven’t gotten done the last seven years.

In short, it seems to me like we had our shot in Afghanistan, and Dubya blew it. I could be wrong, of course. But, to my mind, now feels like a good time to recognize that fact and stop chasing good money after bad.

Dubya By Any Other Name.

“Obama needed to regain control quickly, and he started by jettisoning liberal positions he had been prepared to accept — and had even okayed — just weeks earlier.” TIME’s Massimo Calabresi and Michael Weisskopf examine the recent ousting of Greg Craig, a slow death by leaking, as a telling indicator of how the Obama administration has fallen so far astray on civil liberties. “[Obama] quietly shifted responsibility for the legal framework for counterterrorism from Craig to political advisers overseen by [Rahm] Emanuel, who was more inclined to strike a balance between left and right.” Uh, what? As Nick Baumann points out in Mother Jones, what business do the politicos have in overseeing legal matters? That’s rather Rovian, isn’t it?

On target as usual, Salon‘s Glenn Greenwald puts this Craig story and the KSM trial into broader perspective: “As even Time now recognizes, many of the policies once widely declared by Democrats to be a grave threat to the Constitution are now explicitly adopted by the Obama administration. And it’s flatly inconsistent to invoke ‘the rule of law’ to defend Obama’s decision to give trials to a few Guantanamo detainees without pointing out that he’s violating that very same precept by denying trials to so many.” (Pic via the MJ article linked above.)

Backing into a Quagmire.

“I will tell you the more I just stayed awake last night thinking about this thing, the more I think of it, I don’t know what in the hell it looks to me like we’re getting into another Korea […] I don’t think it’s worth fighting for and I don’t think we can get out. And it’s just the biggest damned mess that I ever saw.” Also via Greenwald today and in light of Obama’s upcoming decision on Afghanistan, former LBJ aide Bill Moyers painstakingly pieces together how his old boss made the decision to escalate in Vietnam. “We will never know what would have happened if Lyndon Johnson had said no to more war. We know what happened because he said yes.“

Brain-Eating by Other Means.

“Instead, constructivists would posit that the zombie problem is what we make of it. That is to say, there are a number of possible emergent norms in response to zombies. Sure, there’s the Hobbesian ‘kill or be killed’ end game that does seem to be quite popular in the movies. But there could be a Kantian “pluralistic anti-Zombie” community that bands together and breaks down nationalist divides in an effort to establish a world state.“

Following up on this recent mathematical modeling study confirming the dire global ramifications of a zombie outbreak (naturally, the talk-radio right remains unconvinced), Daniel Drezner ponders the responses of various IR schools to World War Z. “Now, some would dispute whether neoconservatism is a systemic argument, but let’s posit that it’s a coherent IR theory…clearly, neoconservatives would argue, zombies hate us for our freedom not to eat other humans’ brains.“

Tehran v. Twitter.

“‘The Iranian government must understand that the world is watching,’ Obama said in a written statement. ‘We call on the Iranian government to stop all violent and unjust actions against its own people.’“

As protests — and violence — escalate in Tehran after last week’s dubious election returns, the world increasingly looks to social networking sites to ascertain what’s really going on in the streets. The revolution may not be televised, but — so far at least — it seems to be managing quite well with Twitter: “This is a country where you have tens of thousands of bloggers, and these bloggers have been in a situation where the Internet has been filtered since 2004. Anyone worth their salt knows how to find an open proxy [to get around government firewalls and filters], knows how to work around censorship…The Iranian government, by filtering the Internet for so long, has actually trained a cadre of people who really know who to get around censorship.“

Update: Over at Salon, Iranian-American journalist Hooman Majd (who’s making the rounds — I saw him on the Lehrer News Hour yesterday as well) argues that the role of social networking has been vastly overstated: “More people have access to the Internet in Iran than other Middle Eastern countries but often it’s dial-up, it’s slow, they don’t do it like we do all day long…The depiction of the Internet revolution isn’t quite accurate. We’re putting our own image onto Iran. Of course there are people Twittering from the demonstrations; they’re just not representative of the vast majority of Iranians. What was so heartwarming about this whole thing is that the Iranian people stood up in mass and said you can’t take this away from us.“

Not this time, Luthor.

“Any legitimate terror suspect, she said, would almost certainly be held in remote, high-security ‘supermax’ federal prisons, which are already home to convicted terrorists like British shoe bomber Richard Reid and Zacarias Moussaoui, the alleged 20th hijacker of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. That’s what these prisons are designed for.” The WP’s Dan Froomkin surveys the most recent idiocy being spouted by Republicans — as well as FBI director Robert Mueller and far too many Senate Democrats: that moving detainees from Gitmo into maximum security prisons would represent a clear and present danger to the republic. (As always, see also Glenn Greenwald on this ridiculous subject.)

I’m unclear as to what the GOP thinks will happen if we move these detainees into our regular prison system (other than that it’ll probably be harder to waterboard them.) What kind of fantasyland do these yokels reside in? These detainees aren’t Lex Luthor or the Joker. They have no vast army of misguided goons waiting to help them in the Big House. (In fact, I think they’ll find they don’t have much in common with your run-of-the-mill hard time lifer.) Nor have they concocted any diabolical master plans to escape from these extremely secure institutions. Newsflash: Those supercriminal types you read about in comics don’t actually exist. (And, while we’re debunking conservative fantasies, forget what you saw Jack Bauer do: “ticking time bomb” scenarios don’t in fact happen either, and, even if they did, torture is in no way effective as a means of obtaining the information you’d need. Not that its efficacy matters anyway, because it’s a war crime regardless.)

Absurd. Blatantly absurd. And altogether irritating that, once again, too many Democrats in Congress are not only taking these inchoate lunacies seriously, but grimly echoing them as if there’s even a modicum of sound reasoning going on here. Can these conservatives and their Dem enablers distinguish between the Real World and their bizarre, half-baked realm of nightmares anymore? At this point, I half-expect Chuck Grassley and Harry Reid to tell me they’re imprisoning Zubadayah, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, et al in a pane of glass and shooting them into the far reaches of space. I mean, it worked for General Zod in Superman II, right?

We are the World.

We are its leaders. We are the ones who make a brighter day, so let’s give a trillion. “Mr. Brown, who organized the meeting in a hangarlike conference center in London, said: ‘This is the day the world came together to fight against the global recession. Our message today is clear and certain: we believe that global problems require global solutions.’“

In the meantime, Slate‘s Fred Kaplan applauds the return of real, honest-to-goodness American statecraft in London. “Vast multinational conferences, like the G20 summit…are useful mainly for the ‘bilaterals’ — the one-on-one side-room conversations — and, in these forums, President Barack Obama is living up to high expectations. Which is to say, the United States seems to be returning to diplomatic basics — a development that in the wake of the last eight years is practically revolutionary.“

At the very least, the president’s diplomatic mojo seemed to work on Russian president Dmitry Medvedev. “‘Yesterday I spoke about this with my new comrade President Barack Obama,’ Medvedev told reporters travelling with him to the London summit…’I liked the talks. It is easy to talk to him. He can listen. The start of this relationship is good,’ he said, adding: ‘Today it’s a totally different situation (compared to Bush).'”

A Fork in the Road.

“It’s a debate that the Bush administration never seriously had in the seven years following the post-9/11 invasion. Now, by contrast, in the wake of three major strategic reviews, Obama is extending and deepening the discussion of Afghanistan, because the outcome of this debate may set the course of American foreign policy for the remainder of his presidency.” Counter-terrorism (CT) or counter-insurgency (COIN)? In Slate, Fred Kaplan discusses the major decision on Afghanistan before Obama this week.

Update: “‘We have a clear and focused goal: to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future,’ Obama said. ‘That is the goal that must be achieved.’” The president announces our new Af-Pak strategy. Sounds like the COINS won out. Update 2: Or did they? Call it CT-plus.

Clinton: Mea Culpa, Mexico.

“‘I feel very strongly we have a co-responsibility,’ Clinton told reporters accompanying her to Mexico City a day after the Obama administration said it would send more money, technology and manpower to secure the Southwestern frontier and help Mexico battle the cartels.” During a visit to our ailing neighbor, Secretary of State Clinton admits American culpability in the exacerbating of Mexico’s drug war. “‘Our insatiable demand for illegal drugs fuels the drug trade,’ she said. ‘Our inability to prevent weapons from being illegally smuggled across the border to arm these criminals causes the deaths of police officers, soldiers and civilians… Clearly, what we have been doing has not worked and it is unfair for our incapacity… to be creating a situation where people are holding the Mexican government and people responsible,’ she said.’That’s not right.’“

Well, cheers to Sec. Clinton for being honest about some of the causes of Mexico’s escalating drug violence. Still, in pledging tighter borders, more troops, yadda yadda yadda, she and the administration are still dancing around one of the more obvious solutions to the problem.