Obama's Class Warfare

I'm sure many engaged in today's huge controversy over John McCain's houses believe they've found a winning ticket in portraying the Arizona Senator as "elitist" and "out of touch" with average Americans facing economic dislocation.

Barack Obama led the charge himself at a campaign rally today in Chester, Virginia, where he claimed:

I guess if you think that being rich means you gotta make five million dollars, and if you don’t know how many houses you have, then it’s not surprising that you might think the economy is fundamentally strong.

There's no other way to look at Obama's outburst (and the left's piling on) than anything besides rank class warfare.

Maybe this tack will play well in stoking latent working class resentments at inflation, housing instability, and rising unemployment. Maybe this meme will stick if the American electorate is undergoing a fundamental shift in ideological orientation toward the abandonment of free market competition and opportunity-based upward mobility. Or, perhaps Obama's income-envy will play with those who harbor genuine revolutionary inclinations, and see the Illinois Senator as the vanguard of the proletariat.

More likely, Obama's attack on McCain's residential non-recollection reveals the candidate's subterranean push to resurrect Great Society liberalism in America.

Note that Obama's quoted in the Wall Street Journal today, regarding his recent statements on health care reform:

'If I were designing a system from scratch, I would probably go ahead with a single-payer system," Barack Obama told an audience in Albuquerque on Monday. He was lauding the idea of a health-care market -- or nonmarket -- entirely run by the government.

Most liberals support single payer, aka "Medicare for All," because it would eliminate the profit motive, which by their lights is the reason Americans are uninsured....

With good reason, critics often call this a back-door route to a centrally planned health-care bureaucracy. For all his lawyerly qualifications, Mr. Obama has essentially admitted that his proposal is really the front door.

Thus, Obama's smears this afternoon are of a piece with his larger shift toward leftist ideological transparency.

Indeed, it's all coming together: Obama has been under fire this week for advocating an abortion position tantamount to infanticide, which has placed him to the left of NARAL. Obama's also been revealed as nothing more than a two-bit machine politician (rather that some ethereal agent of post-partisan transformation) by reports that he won his first election to the Illinois legislature in 1996 by disqualifying all of his electoral opponents from the ballot. It turns out, moreover, that the Obama camp may be involved in a massive cover up of his failed leadership as board chairman overseeing the Chicago Annenberg Challenge.

In any case, do the Obama people really think this is smart politics? Obama generated big political trouble previously with his bitter comments on working class resentments (remarks that were widely perceived to be based in Marxist sensibilities). The candidate himself resides in a million-dollar mansion, in Chicago's tony Hyde Park neighborhood (where few people of color reside, not to mention the lumpen proletariat). He purchased his seven-figure abode through the good offices of convicted felon Tony Rezko. And for good measure, the Obamas provide their children with elite private education, at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, where the tuition costs from $15,528 for kindergarten to $20,445 for high school!

The truth is that Obama's had difficulties connecting with average Americans all year, and his appeal to class warfare goes against traditional American support for free markets; current polling indicates that citizens overwhelmingly "prefer that the government focus on improving overall economic conditions and the jobs situation in the United States as opposed to taking steps to distribute wealth more evenly among Americans."

To top it all off, the left's attack on McCain is essentially dishonest: "McCain himself doesn’t own any property and isn’t “rich”, and Cindy and her family earned their money honestly."

After weeks of collapsing numbers in presidential preference surveys, Obama and his left-wing partisans are naturally pumped at the prospect of a potent smear against John McCain. Unfortunately, class warfare has never been a winner in American politics, and even now, in an ostensibly Democratic year, the left's going to need something bit more powerful than a couple of misplaced condominiums if they hope to retake the White House.

Attack Ads Slam Obama Ahead of Democratic Convention!

Presidential mudslinging has gone full bore today, with the release of two new ad buys slamming Barack Obama.

The first, embedded here at top, is from the American Issues Project, which has launched a 2.8 million TV campaign attacking Obama's deep ties to former Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers. The second, embedded below, is John McCain's new spot hitting Obama for enlisting convicted Chicago land racketeer Tony Rezko to purchase his million-dollar mansion.

The McCain campaign is responding the Obama camp's attacks on McCain's comment that he "wasn't sure about how many houses he and his wife own."

The intensity of the attacks indicates the high-stakes nature of the current political battle. While Obama hopes to portray McCain as a hopeless elitist out of touch with average families, GOP forces seek to build on the summer's increasing evidence of Barack Obama's radicalism.

Obama's Failed Leadership at Chicago Annenberg Challenge

New reports are emerging that cast a damaging light on Barack Obama's leadership tenure at the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC), an educational reform initiative promoting innovative learning methodologies. Obama was Chairman of the Board at CAC from 1995 to 1999.

Thomas Lifson has the background:

The cloak of media invisibility is slowly beginning to lift from Barack Obama's most important administrative leadership experience, helming an expensive educational reform effort in Chicago that failed to produce any measurable academic gains, according to the project's own final report.

Add in the fact that former Weatherman and admitted terrorist William Ayers (whom Obama described in the Philadelphia debate as merely a "neighbor") was head of the operating arm of the CAC, working with Obama on distributing scores of millions of dollars to grantees in the wards of the city, and you have a topic that the Obama campaign wishes to avoid at all costs.

A compliant media has averted its eyes so far. A timeline of Obama's career from George Washington University omits it. Why the McCain campaign has not raised more questions on the subject is a question beyond my pay grade. But there are signs it is on the case.

The four plus years (1995-1999) Barack Obama spent as founding chairman of the board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC) represent his track record as reformer, as someone who reached out in a public-private collaboration and had the audacity to believe his effort would make things better. At the time he became leader of this ambitious project to remake the public schools of Chicago, he was 33 years old and a third year associate at a small Chicago law firm, Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland.

This was a big test for him, his chance to cut his teeth on bringing hope and change to the mostly minority inner city school children trapped in Chicago schools. And he flopped big time, squandering lots of money and the time of many public employees in the process.

Given Senator Obama's lack of any other posts as leader of an organization, someone unschooled in the ways of the American media might expect that for months reporters have been poring over the records of the project to get an idea of how it managed to fail so badly. Examining the track record of the guy who wants to lead the federal government would seem to be part of the campaign beat for media organizations.

Dan Riehl has more:

Continuing to follow up on what can be learned of Barack Obama's tenure as the Chairman of the Board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC), evaluations of the program during his tenure available on line demonstrate that in his only real executive test, Barack Obama was a dismal failure squandering millions of dollars on education programs which had basically no real effect. They also strongly suggest Obama's claim that un-repentant terrorist Bill Ayers is just a teacher who lived down the block is an outright lie. The structure and tone of the CAC, addressed in the documents, leave a strong impression the two men had to work together closely over a number of years. Also, as copies of CAC internal documents were given over to the evaluators, any notion that they now shouldn't be immediately shared with the public is an absolute farce.

Given Obama's significant lack of experience, aside from any Ayers connection which Stanley Kurtz continues to pursue, it's doubtful he'd want America to learn any details behind his obviously failed performance during the one time he was expected to perform as an executive in the real world.

Continue reading Reihl at the link.

Here's the screen shot of the executive summary of the institution's final report, "The Chicago Annenberg Challenge: Successes, Failures, and Lessons for the Future":

Lifson indicates that journalists and researchers have been denied access to the Annenberg project's data base, housed at the publicly-funded University of Illinois Chicago.

Andrew Malcolm and John Kass have the details on the university's refusal to release the records.

George W. Bush and World Politics

Robert Kagan, at the new Foreign Affairs, makes the case that President George W. Bush came to office with a realist perspective on international affairs.

This approach hardly endeared the administration to the nations of the world.

The U.S. in the late-1990s was frequently rebuked for pursuing a narrow national interest on issues ranging from global warming to the International Criminal Court to Saddam Hussein's Iraq. American preponderance was ridiculed in 1998 by French Foreign Hubert Védrine as unreconciled "hyperpower." Leaders across the capitals of Europe called for promoting an "international community" concerned with "the common interests of humanity." America's focus on self-interest power maximization was out of step with international demands for a more cooperative internationalism.

Thus, the accession of President Bush to the White House was seen around the world as a continuation of the 1990s pattern of self-centered power management in in international politics:

Even before he took office, cartoonists were drawing him as a Texas cowboy with six-shooters and a noose. The French politician Jack Lang called him a "serial assassin." The Guardian's Martin Kettle wrote, on January 7, 2001, in The Washington Post, that "the mounting global impatience" with the United States predated Bush but that his election was the "best recruiting sergeant that the new anti-Americanism could have hoped for."

Kagan's historical refresher on the Bush transition in global poltics will likely cause fits of cognitive dissonance for those hostile to this adminstration's foreign policy. For one thing, he makes the case that the war on terror has been an astounding success:

Judged on its own terms, the war on terror has been by far Bush's greatest success. No serious observer imagined after September 11 that seven years would go by without a single additional terrorist attack on U.S. soil. Only naked partisanship and a justifiable fear of tempting fate have prevented the Bush administration from getting or taking credit for what most would have regarded seven years ago as a near miracle. Much of the Bush administration's success, moreover, has been due to extensive international cooperation, especially with the European powers in the areas of intelligence sharing, law enforcement, and homeland security. Whatever else the Bush administration has failed to do, it has not failed to protect Americans from another attack on the homeland. The next administration will be fortunate to be able to say the same -- and will be contrasted quite unfavorably with the Bush administration if it cannot.

But what may be particulary touchy for the antiwar forces is Kagan's dicussion of the link between September 11, bipartisanship, and American regime change in Iraq:

The invasion was partly related to the war on terror. The Clinton administration had also worried about Saddam's terrorist ties and had used those suspected links to justify its own military action against Iraq in 1998. Clinton himself warned that if the United States did not take action against Saddam, the world would "see more and more of the very kind of threat Iraq poses now -- a rogue state with weapons of mass destruction, ready to use them or provide them to terrorists, drug traffickers, or organized criminals who travel the world among us unnoticed." After September 11, a dramatically lowered tolerance for threats helps explain why realists such as Cheney, who had earlier believed Saddam could be safely deterred and contained, suddenly felt differently. The same logic drove Senator Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) and many other Democrats and moderate Republicans in Congress to authorize the use of force in October 2002, producing the lopsided Senate vote of 77-23. It was why outspoken opposition to the war was so rare. The Time columnist Joe Klein reflected the mood in an interview on the eve of the war: "Sooner or later, this guy has to be taken out. . . . The message has to be sent because if it isn't sent now . . . it empowers every would-be Saddam out there and every would-be terrorist out there."

The principal rationales for invading Iraq predated the war on terror, however, and also predated Bush's realism. They were consistent with the broader view of U.S. interests that had prevailed in the Clinton years and during the Cold War. Iraq in the 1990s had been seen by many not as a direct threat to the United States but as a problem of world order for which the United States had a special responsibility. As then National Security Adviser Sandy Berger had argued in 1998, "The future of Iraq will affect the way in which the Middle East and the Arab world in particular evolve in the next decade and beyond." That was why people such as Richard Armitage, Francis Fukuyama, and Robert Zoellick could sign a letter in 1998 calling for Saddam's forcible removal. That was why, as The New York Times' Bill Keller (now the paper's executive editor) wrote at the time, liberals in what he called "The I-Can't-Believe-I'm-a-Hawk Club" supported the war, including "op-ed regulars at [The New York Times] and The Washington Post, the editors of The New Yorker, The New Republic and Slate, columnists in Time and Newsweek," as well as many former Clinton officials.

Those liberals and progressives who favored war against Iraq did so for much the same reason they had favored war in the Balkans: as necessary to help preserve the liberal international order. They preferred to see the United States get UN backing for the war, but they also knew this had been impossible in the case of Kosovo. Their chief worry was that the Bush administration, after toppling Saddam, would take a narrow realist approach in dealing with the aftermath. As Senator Joe Biden (D-Del.) put it, "Some of these guys don't go for nation-building." A former Clinton official, Ronald Asmus, asked, "Is this about American power, or is it about democracy?" If it was about democracy, he believed, the United States would "have a broader base of support at home and more friends abroad."

This broad consensus among American conservatives, liberals, progressives, and neoconservatives, however, was not replicated in the rest of the world. For Europeans, there was a big difference between Kosovo and Iraq. It was not about legality or the UN. It was about location. Europeans were ready to go to war without UN authorization in a matter that concerned them, their security, their history, and their morality. Iraq was another story. To American liberals such as the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, "Europe's cynicism and insecurity, masquerading as moral superiority," was "insufferable."

Kagan concludes the essay making the case for America adopting a more "enlightened" view of U.S. interests in the world, interests of a more normative, liberal internationalist tone. He also reminds us, however, of the importance of values, and that America's vision of democracy and liberty remain the touchstone of expansive global freedom.

This too may strike readers as neoconservative ideological hubris, although the facts indicate that Americ's self-image as a beacon of liberty also predates the years of George W. Bush.

See also, "The Bush Legacy Begins."

Obama's Polling Slide Reveals Deep Liabilities

Barack Obama's deep collapse in public opinion continues this afternoon with the findings from the new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll. Obama holds advantages on domestic isssues, but he's far from where he should be for a generic Democrat at this stage of the campaign, and he's showing deep liabilities on intenational affairs and crisis leadership. Chuck Todd provides the analysis:

The Wall Street Journal's data is in line with other recent survey's tracking an Obama collapse.

As I argued earlier today, at this rate it's unlikely that Obama will enjoy a polling bump from next week's Democratic National Convention. Indeed, it looks like "The One" peaked way too early this year, and since the Illinois Senator's radicalism continues to provide scandal-fodder, buyer's remorse may genuinely come to characterize Democratic Party sentiment after Labor Day.

The "Clinton Factor" will be a likely contributor:

... perhaps the biggest factor keeping the presidential race close has been Obama’s inability to close the deal with some of Hillary Clinton’s supporters. According to the poll, 52 percent of them say they will vote for Obama, but 21 percent are backing McCain, with an additional 27 percent who are undecided or want to vote for someone else.

What’s more, those who backed Clinton in the primaries — but aren’t supporting Obama right now — tend to view McCain in a better light than Obama and have more confidence in McCain’s ability to be commander-in-chief.

See also, "Obama Hammered by Massive Erosion in Public Opinion."

Obama Will Get No Post-Denver Polling Bounce

In 1992, Bill Clinton enjoyed a 16 percentage-point bounce in public opinion following that year's Democratic National Convention.

Since then, the average post-convention bounce has been 5 points. Yet, because of the tightly aligned convention dates for the Democrats and Republicans this summer, as well as the expectation that John McCain will announce his running mate simultaneously with Barack Obama's acceptance speech, Democratic chances for a substantial boost in post-Denver public opinion look poor. Gallup reports:

The conventions are one of the most anticipated events of the political calendar, and thus, their potential to shift voter preferences is great. In 1988 and 1992, the conventions were the turning points in the campaign, moving the formerly trailing candidate ahead for the duration. In other years, such as 1980 and 2000, the conventions produced a change in the front-runner, but not a permanent one, as subsequent events (in particular, the debates) led to changes later in the campaign.

Typically, Gallup finds candidates gaining 5 points in the polls after their conventions, though it is far from a guarantee that the candidates will receive bounces of that size in 2008.

There are a number of factors that could lead to smaller-than-usual convention bounces this year, most notably the tightly compressed convention schedule, with the GOP Convention beginning just four days after the Democratic Convention ends. Also, it is rumored that McCain will announce his vice presidential running mate the day after the Democratic Convention ends, stealing away some of the political spotlight from Obama the day after he gives his presidential nomination acceptance speech. Lastly, the high level of early voter attention may also reduce the potential for significant shifts in voter preferences after the conventions.

More troublesome, Obama's polling numbers have declined amid a series of campaign missteps which have shifted the presidential horse race to McCain's advantage.

In the wake of the Saddleback civil forum, the Obama camp has seen a 15-point collapse in the Zogby poll, which while unusually large, is not too distinct from Obama's decline since late-July, when a the Wall Street Journal found Obama leading McCain by a 47-to -41 percent margin. The Journal survey, however, found McCain with an 11-point advantage on questions of experience and traditional values, a division that may well be exacerbated by this week's revelations on Obama's abortion extremism.

Moreover, Americans continue to harbor doubts about Obama's patriotism, which may add to the Illinois Senator's post-convention doldrums.

In the absence of a "comeback kid" moment for Barack Obama, there may be little hope for a reprise of the Bill Clinton post-convention bounce of 1992.

Darcy Burner Disappoints in November Election Preview

The Hill is portraying Darcy Burner's second-place showing in today 8th congressional district open primary as a strong effort, raising concerns for the incumbent, Republican Dave Reichert.

But considering Burner, a Democratic challenger who sought Reichert's seat in 2006, is running a 3-to-1 advantage in fundraising totals for this quarter, and who had $600,000 more cash on hand than Reichert at the end of July, her inability to out-poll the incumbent looks troubling. Particularly so, considering all the big talk of 2008 being a Democratic year, a trend that has seen some support in Democratic special election victories earlier this year.

Burner has the name recognition and campaign organization necessary for the 50 percent-plus showing necessary to put away doubts of her electoral weeknesses. Indeed, The Hill cites the agreement of the National Republican Campaign Committee:

The NRCC sought to undercut Burner for not outpolling Reichert, despite the Burner campaign's receiving heavy assistance from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC). The district is part of the Democrats' Red-to-Blue program.

“The DCCC must be reconsidering the $1 million television buy they placed for Burner and looking at other, more viable races,” the NRCC’s release said.

See also, the Primary's Message: Here We Go Again

Burner is the golden child of the progressive netroots antiwar movement. She is a co-author of "A Responible Plan to End the War in Iraq," a manifesto that appears not only out to touch with the realities of war on the ground in the theater, but with public opinion as well. In fact, the plan is irresponsible, which may have contributed to her failure in today's Washington State primary.

McCain Veep Pick Under Conservative Spotlight

Captain Ed suggests that Senator Joseph Lieberman would be a disaster as John McCain's pick as vice-presidential running mate:

The addition of Joe Lieberman will not convince independents that McCain is a maverick; it will convince an already-skeptical GOP base that McCain is a RINO.

I agree, and for the McCain camp to be seriously considering the Connecticut Senator raises questions about the campaign's strategic acumen. While the length and nastiness of the Democratic primaries may hold more prominence in the popular imagination, the Republican race demonstrated tremendous schisms over the direction of the GOP and the future of conservatism. With the presidential race now deadlocked (and McCain leads in today's Zogby poll), this is no time to rekindle voter resentment among the GOP base.

This morning's New York Times examines the potential for a conservative backlash if McCain bombs in the pick for a running mate:

Senator John McCain is facing increasing scrutiny about his selection of a running mate as some social conservatives expressed alarm on Tuesday that Mr. McCain might ask a candidate who favors abortion rights to join him on the ticket.

But other conservatives said that Mr. McCain, who has long been in step with the Republican Party platform in opposing abortion, was unlikely to be the first Republican presidential nominee in decades to select such a candidate. They said that Mr. McCain’s recent public flirtation with Tom Ridge, a former Pennsylvania governor who supports abortion rights, was as much to give the appearance that Mr. McCain had an open mind on the issue as it was an embrace of Mr. Ridge.

“I think there’s such sufficient understanding at the most senior levels of this campaign of the importance of the pro-family constituency that I’m very comfortable with how the selection process is proceeding,” one Republican strategist close to the campaign said. “I think social conservatives will be fine.”

I'm surprised that Tom Ridge, with his pro-choice record, is even a top contender for the veepstakes. His abortion record alone is a killer, but his mediocre record as secretary of the DHS gargantuan is also at odds with popular hopes for the return of small-g conservatism. Besides, his ramrod straight persona seems out of step with the McCain's style of light-touch banter and easy-going demeanor.

Abortion politcs has emerged as one of the hottest opportunities for the GOP to pick up independent pro-lifers, as Barack Obama's abortion radicalism has been on full display this week.

This development means that Tim Pawlenty should be considered a great possibility for the GOP. While there are some concerns on Pawlenty's cap-and-trade views, I doubt there's going to be a conservative revolt if the Minnesota Governor gets the nod.

Mitt Romney's getting a lot of speculation as well.

For the most part, a Romney pick would be the safest in consolidating the GOP base, and it would have they added benefit of pumping up the delegates at the Republican National Convention (recall the National Review endorsement, as well as Romney's backing in conservative talk-radio). A rousing nominating convention, which would follow the Democrats and the Obama-triumph-of-the-will INVESCO spectacle, would help dampen down enthusiasm for the Democratic nominee, a give the GOP a potentially longer-lasting bounce in the post-Labor Day general election kick off.

Joseph Lieberman should be a top pick for Secretary of Defense or State, but he has no business running along with McCain as the GOP vice-presidential candidate.

The Left's Rachel Maddow Arousal

MSNBC has announced that progressive radio personality and political analyst Rachel Maddow will take over the network's 9pm time slot, replacing veteran anchor Dan Abrams:

With the promotion, which takes effect Sept. 8, Maddow, 35, breaks into what had been criticized as a boys club at the network, led by [Keith] Olbermann and Chris Matthews. Hillary Clinton's campaign frequently ripped MSNBC for what it called sexist coverage during the Democratic primaries. Maddow, who lives with her girlfriend Susan Mikula in Manhattan and Northampton, Mass., may also be the first openly gay woman to host a prime-time program.

Her appointment is certain to draw criticism that MSNBC is moving further left in an attempt to compete with Fox News from the opposite side of the spectrum. John McCain's campaign has repeatedly assailed the network's campaign coverage as biased.

Perhaps the network's leftward lurch explains why the radical netroots is in heat over Maddow's appointment.

Daily Kos gets worked up, "Finally":

I'll never understand why this took so damn long ... Her show will follow Olbermann's, and a HUGE congratulations to one of the smartest voices on cable land.

Spencer Ackerman erupts with some vengeance:

To see an unapologetic, confrontational progressive display a forthrightly liberal point of view from behind the anchor desk of a cable television news show with any consistency has been, for years, nonexistent, even as the country has grown progressively more progressive as the obvious decadence of conservatism has been on display. Rachel Maddow is long overdue.

David Sirota positively climaxes:

This is proof that even in today's disgusting, nepotistic and cutthroat media world - a world that too often rewards idiocy and the idiots that spout the idiocy - good things can happen to good people.

Rachel is the opposite of an idiot - she's one of the smartest people in politics today. She is not just good people - she's great people, and she deserves this.

So, I guess to be "smart," "unapologetic," "confrontational," in "today's disgusting, nepotistic" media environment generates a seal of approval from those who have said American contractors killed by terrorists in Iraq had it coming, that President Bush should die "at the hague," and that the United States deserved the "blowback" of the September 11 attacks.

Yep, "good things happen to good people," especially in the MSNBC/Olbermann universe, where former first ladies get demonized as the "worst person in the world.

Not bad for "a Ph.D. Rhodes scholar lesbian policy wonk who started as a prison AIDS activist."

I'm sure Maddow will be more than "fair and balanced" at her new home.

Obama Hammered by Massive Erosion in Public Opinion

Barack Obama's slide into oblivion is picking up, as public opinion data continues to track the Illinois Senator's abject inability to sustain the Obamania sensationalism from the primary season.

Gallup tracking has the presidential race essentially tied, but the Los Angeles Times comes right and declares Obama's collapsing fortunes:

Barack Obama's public image has eroded this summer amid a daily onslaught of attacks from Republican rival John McCain, leaving the race for the White House statistically tied, according to a Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll released today.

Far more voters say McCain has the right experience to be president, the poll found. More than a third have questions about Obama's patriotism.

The survey also illustrates some of the campaign's racial undercurrents as the Illinois senator strives to become the first African American president. Most voters say they know at least some people who feel uneasy about electing a black president; 17% say the country is not ready to do so.

The Times' survey does indicates some difficulties for the GOP.

Recall, though, that a late-July Wall Street Journal survey found tremendous voter unease with Obama on questions of experience and values - and notably, Obama held a 6 percentage-point lead at that time. Since then, we've seen a series of Obama setbacks, for example, on the nature of evil, the human right to life, and on lapses of honesty and integrity.

Such problems have hammered Obama's favorables in public opinion:

Obama's favorable rating has sunk to 48% from 59% since the last Times/Bloomberg poll in June. At the same time, his negative rating has risen to 35% from 27%.

By comparison, McCain's ratings have hardly budged during the same period: 46% of voters have a positive feeling about him; 38% give him negative ratings.

Ultimately, the public widely regards John McCain as more experienced for the presidency.

Obama's collapse in public opinion has triggered a new scale of GOP demonization on the left, which is a sure indication of the dramatic turnaround in Democratic Party fortunes in the election.

Obama: Iraq is War of Choice

Barack Obama, at a New Mexico campaign rally yesterday, denounced the Iraq war as a "war of choice," one that has distracted from the "war of necessity" in Afghanistan, at 1:40 minutes into the video:

It's frankly mindboggling that Obama continues to pander relentlessly to the Democratic Party's radical base. The Iraq war has been won, and even the most implacable opponents have come around to the pro-victory side.

Obama's claim that Iraq is a distraction from Afghanistan is one of the latest antiwar memes seeking to delegitmize the Bush administration and minimize the heroism of American troops serving under the Petraeus command.

Christopher Hitchens previously took down the false war of choice/war of necessity dichotomy:

If we had left Iraq according to the timetable of the anti-war movement, the situation would be the precise reverse: The Iraqi people would now be excruciatingly tyrannized by the gloating sadists of al-Qaida, who could further boast of having inflicted a battlefield defeat on the United States. I dare say the word of that would have spread to Afghanistan fast enough and, indeed, to other places where the enemy operates. Bear this in mind next time you hear any easy talk about "the hunt for the real enemy" or any loose babble that suggests that we can only confront our foes in one place at a time.

Yes, keep this in mind as well, when considering the fact that a third of voters say they can't trust Obama on national security.

Obama's Symbol of Distress

The DNC credentials designed for those attending Barack Obama's speech at INVESCO Field display an upside-down American flag:

Some viewers contacted 9NEWS Saturday, questioning the design of the credentials to see Sen. Barack Obama accept the Democratic Party's presidential nomination at INVESCO Field at Mile High.

The viewers say with the stars and blue field in the lower left corner, it looks like an upside down American flag. Published flag etiquette states the stars should always be displayed in the upper left corner. An upside down flag represents an international symbol of extreme distress.

Matt Chandler with the Obama campaign says the flag is not upside down. He says it is a stylized flag designed to blend the stars on Senator Obama's shirt with the flag blowing in the wind.

Natalie Wyeth with the Democratic National Convention Committee sent 9NEWS the following statement Saturday night: "The DNCC community credentials incorporate patriotic design elements. They do not depict an actual American flag. The DNCC has full and complete respect for the flag and all rules of display."

This DNC flag imbroglio perfectly symbolizes the distress of Barack Obama's presidential campign.

The tide is turning toward the GOP. The race for the White House remains tied, the rush of Obamania has receded, and the Illinois Senator has been dogged for weeks with campaign missteps and new revelations of social policy extremism, and questions of character and integrity.

The DNC's upside-down symbol of distress is the perfect emblem for a candidate whose patriotism is questionable and one who's opposed by a third of voters on the gravest matters of international security.

Photo Credit: Hot Air

Resurgent Declinism in International Relations

Robert Lieber, at World Affairs, offers an essential rebuttal to the resurgent thesis of American decline in international relations theory.

Lieber notes that claims of America's relative international decline have ideological foundations, usually gaining popularity amid periods of robust assertions of power in American foreign affairs. As with past episodes, today's arguments of American decline ignore the realities of the balance of world power, and thus undestimate the endurance of U.S. preponderance:

Is America finished? Respected public intellectuals, think tank theorists, and members of the media elite seem to think so. The scare headline in a recent New York Times Magazine cover story by Parag Khanna titled “Waving Goodbye to Hegemony” asks, “Who Shrunk the Superpower?” Almost daily, learned authors proclaim The End of the American Era, as the title of a 2002 book by Charles Kupchan put it, and instruct us that the rise of China and India, the reawakening of Putin’s Russia, and the expansion of the European Union signal a profound shift in geopolitical power that will retire once and for all the burden of American Exceptionalism. America has become an “enfeebled” superpower, according to Fareed Zakaria in his book, The Post-American World, which concedes that, while the U.S. will not recede from the world stage anytime soon, “Just as the rest of the world is opening up, America is closing down.” With barely contained satisfaction, a French foreign minister says of America’s standing, “The magic is over . . . It will never be as it was before.”

The United States does contend with serious problems at home and abroad, but these prophecies of doom, which spread like a computer virus, hardly reflect a rational appraisal of where we stand. Moreover, it is not too difficult to see the ghosts of declinism past in the current rush to pen America’s epitaph. Gloomsayers have been with us, after all, since this country’s founding....

It was in the 1970s that declinism began to take on its modern features, following America’s buffeting by oil shocks and deep recessions, a humiliating withdrawal from Vietnam, victories by Soviet-backed regimes or insurgent movements in Africa, Central America, and Southeast Asia, and revolution in Iran along with the seizure of the U.S. embassy there. A 1970 book by Andrew Hacker also announced The End of the American Era. At the end of the decade, Jimmy Carter seemed to give a presidential stamp of approval to Hacker’s diagnosis when he used concerns about a flagging American economy, inflation, recession, and unemployment as talking points in his famous “malaise” speech calling for diminished national expectations.

By the early 1980s, declinism had become a form of historical chic. In 1987, David Calleo’s Beyond American Hegemony summoned the U.S. to come to terms with a more pluralistic world. In the same year, Paul Kennedy published what at the time was greeted as the summa theologica of the declinist movement—The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, in which the author implied that the cycle of rise and decline experienced in the past by the empires of Spain and Great Britain could now be discerned in the “imperial overstretch” of the United States. But Kennedy had bought in at the top: within two years of his pessimistic prediction, the Cold War ended with the Soviet Union in collapse, the Japanese economic miracle entering a trough of its own, and U.S. competitiveness and job creation far outpacing its European and Asian competitors.

Theories of America’s obsolescence aspire to the status of science. But cycles of declinism tend to have a political subtext and, however impeccable the historical methodology that generates them seems to be, they often function as ideology by other means. During the 1980s, for instance, these critiques mostly emanated from the left and focused on Reaganomics and the defense buildup. By contrast, in the Clinton era, right-of-center and realist warnings were directed against the notion of America as an “indispensable nation” whose writ required it to nation-build and spread human rights. Likewise, much of today’s resurgent declinism is propelled not only by arguments over real-world events, but also by a fierce reaction against the Bush presidency—a reaction tainted by partisanship, hyperbole, ahistoricism, and a misunderstanding of the fundamentals that underpin the robustness and staying power of the United States.

Lieber continues with a discussion of the elements of America's continued international preeminence.

The U.S. military, despite the strains of current deployments, is not likely to be surpassed in capabilities or readiness by any other major Western power, and America's autocratic peer competitors in Moscow and Beijing face internal challenges (Russia) or regional balancing (China) that will limit the ability of those states to pose a major challenge to continued American dominance.

Economically, the U.S. remains the engine of world economic prosperity. Beijing, which holds trillions in U.S. treasury securities, won't risk a run on the United States for risk of appreciating its own currency, and pricing its exports out of the American market.

In Europe, nationalist tendencies in the major continental states will continue to prohibit the emergence of a centralized European superpower rivaling America's global presence.

Read the whole thing, here.

Lieber also discusses threats internal to the United States, like cultural decline or unrestrained ethnic diversity, but none of these provide a compelling alternative to the basic history of assimilation and social regeneration supporting America's unrivaled world leadership:

Other countries understand the unique nature of American power—if not wholly selfless, not entirely selfish, either—and its role in underpinning global stability and maintaining a decent world order. This helps to explain why Europe, India, Japan and much of East Asia, and important countries of the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America have no use for schemes to balance against the United States. Most would rather do business with America or be shielded by it.

In the end, then, this country’s structural advantages matter much more than economic cycles, trade imbalances, or surging and receding tides of anti-Americanism. These advantages include America’s size, wealth, human and material resources, military strength, competitiveness, and liberal political and economic traditions, but also a remarkable flexibility, dynamism, and capacity for reinvention. Neither the rise of important regional powers, nor a globalized world economy, nor “imperial overstretch,” nor domestic weaknesses seem likely to negate these advantages in ways the declinists anticipate, often with a fervor that makes their diagnoses and prescriptions resemble a species of wish fulfillment.

See also, Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth, World Out of Balance:International Relations and the Challenge of American Primacy.

Obama's Abortion Extremism

Today's front-page Los Angeles Times features a strangely-titled article on abortion politics in the presidential campaign, "McCain and Obama Try to Navigate the Politics of Abortion."

It's an odd-sounding piece, in the case of John McCain, at least, as the Arizona Senator's hardly struggling to find a voice on reproductive health issues. McCain's clarity on abortion, for example, at Saturday's Saddleback civil forum offered a striking contrast to Barack Obama's all-encompassing effort to avoid alienating anyone concerned about the right to life.

Indeed, following his appearance with Pastor Rick Warren, Obama's abortion stance (stances?) is turning out to be a major campaign liabliity.

As a number of outlets have reported, Obama has taken what are considered "extreme" positions on the Born Alive Infant Protection Act, the name of proposed Illinois legislation that would have prohibited the destruction of fetuses born alive but not yet viable.

Nice Deb has the video from Jill Stanek, who lays out Obama's dishonesty on live infant abortions:

Building on Stanek's disussion is David Freddosso, who lays out the case against Obama's "life lies" with the precision of a courtroom prosecutor:

In 2001, Senator Barack Obama was the only member of the Illinois senate to speak against a bill that would have recognized premature abortion survivors as “persons.” The bill was in response to a Chicago-area hospital that was leaving such babies to die. Obama voted “present” on the bill after denouncing it. It passed the state Senate but died in a state house committee.

In 2003, a similar bill came before Obama’s health committee. He voted against it. But this time, the legislation was slightly different. This latter version was identical to the federal Born-Alive Infants Protection Act, which by then had already passed the U.S. Senate unanimously (with a hearty endorsement even from abortion advocate Sen. Barbara Boxer) and had been signed into law by President Bush.

Sen. Obama is currently misleading people about what he voted against, specifically claiming that the bill he voted against in his committee lacked “neutrality” language on Roe v. Wade. The bill did contain this language. He even participated in the unanimous vote to put it in.

Obama’s work against the bill to protect premature babies represents one of two times in his political career, along with his speech against the Iraq war, that he really stuck out his neck for something that might hurt him politically. Unlike his Iraq speech, Obama is deeply embarrassed about this one — so embarrassed that he is offering a demonstrable falsehood in explanation for his actions. Fortunately, the documents showing the truth are now available.

At the end of last week, Obama gave an interview to CBN’s David Brody in which he repeated the false claim that the born-alive bills he worked, spoke, and voted against on this topic between 2001 and 2003 would have negatively affected Roe v. Wade. This has always been untrue, but, until last week, it appeared to be a debatable point that depended on one’s interpretation of the bill language. Every single version of the bill was neutral on Roe. Each one affected only babies already born, not ones in the womb.

But in 2003, in the health committee which he chaired, Obama voted against a version of the bill that contained the specific “neutrality” language — redundant language affirming that the bill only applied to infants already born and granted no rights to the unborn. You can visit the Illinois legislature’s website here to see the language of the “Senate Amendment 1,” which was added in a unanimous 10-0 vote in the committee before Obama helped kill it.

See the post for the language of the proposed legislation. Freddosso notes that the Illinois version ended up being identical to the U.S. government's Born-Alive Infants Protection Act, which was signed into law in 2002 by president George W. Bush.

Obama claimed this week that he has fully supported efforts to protect infants born as a result of induced-abortions. However, both Jill Stanek and David Freddosso demonstrate these claims as bald-face lies.

McCain and Obama remain tied in public opinion polls, but as news of Obama's abortion extremism gets increasing attention, the survival of Democratic presidential hopes will also need protection.

See Nice Deb for additional videos of Obama's lies and obfuscations.

Catholic League Takes Issue With Offensive Lefty Blogs

I've spent a good amount of time laying out a theory of the secular demonology common among lefty bloggers. Part of this project has been to offer comparisons of crude profanity widely available across the leftosphere.

Thus, I'm not surprised that the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights has identifed as "offensive" a number of left-wing blogs that have been credentialed by the Democratic National Committee:

Over 120 blogs have been credentialed as members of the media for the Democratic National Convention; those who have received credentials are allowed to cover the Convention at the Pepsi Center. While most of them offer legitimate commentary, some do not.

Catholic League president Bill Donohue is protesting two of the blogs:

“The list of credentialed blogs include radical sites like The Daily Kos. Worse are blogs that feature anti-Catholic and obscene material. The two most offensive are Bitch Ph.D. and Towleroad.

“On the home page of Bitch Ph.D. there is a picture of two children: one of them is shown flashing his middle finger. Today’s lead post, which was written August 17, is called ‘Jesus Christ.’ It begins with, ‘I’m a really crappy Catholic who hasn’t been to mass in ages because most parishes around here ‘will’ insist on being aggressively anti-abortion….’ The writer then objects to some children’s toys on the grounds that they are more offensive than desecrating the Eucharist. The toys are actually balloons that have been made to depict Jesus in various poses, including a crucified Christ; one of these images shows Jesus with a penis. Several who commented on this image made patently obscene comments.

“Towleroad describes itself as ‘A Site with Homosexual Tendencies.’ Accordingly, it shows men in jock straps and underwear. It also has a post on Pope Benedict XVI that takes him to task for wearing a cape with ermine. Some of those who commented on this described the pope in a vile and profane way.

“Both of these blogs should be cut immediately from the list of credentialed sites. Neither functions as a responsible media outlet and both offend Catholics, as well as others. To allow them access to the Democratic National Convention sends a message to Catholics they will not forget. We look for Leah Daughtry, CEO of the Convention, to nix them ASAP.”

I can't dismiss the sense of schadenfreude at Bitch Ph.D.'s selection, as I've been singled out by that outfit for my "racism" in denouncing the black cult of victimology.

I've never heard of "Toweleroad," although by the looks of it I can understand the Catholic League's objection.

What's interesting is the affirmation of the Catholic League's concerns, as evidenced by a look at some of the lefty responses attacking the organization's president, Bill Donohue:

How dare there be gays on the internet! Amazingly, Donahue lists the jock strap photos before citing an allegedly offensive post about the Pope. No one who isn't a closeted homosexual would be so distressed about unapologetic displays of homosexuality. You should just come out of the closet, Bill. We'll accept you for who you are.

The Carpetbagger Report asks:

Did the Catholic League go through all 120 blogs, looking for something that would offend them so they could do this press release? By the looks of it, I’m pretty sure they did.

I'd bet they didn't have to view more than a quarter of these before finding some objectionable material.

Still, the issue for me is not that they should be banned, but how well they represent Democratic Party base? I'm pretty sure they do.

Ignominy Strikes Obama Camp in Saddleback Aftermath

I've never seen anything like it.

The latest controversy has it that Barack Obama did so poorly at Saturday's Saddleback civil forum that left-wing commentators and members of the Obama entourage have made allegations of cheating against John McCain. I first saw the story at Newsbusters, which noted that NBC's Andrea Mitchell suggested to her colleague the possibility of McCain cheating by overhearing Pastor Rick Warren's interview with Obama. Betsy Newmark responded to the Newsbusters piece:

These guys are so full of themselves and their guy's miraculous abilities that they can't imagine John McCain would actually come off as more forceful and prepared than Obama. So they have started whispering that McCain, with his superhuman powers, somehow escaped the "cone of silence" to overhear the questions.

Mitchell also seems to be missing how illuminating that whispered accusation is. They're at the same time revealing how badly they think their guy did; how impossible it seems to them that their guy could do worse than the old guy; and how little they think of Rick Warren and the Saddleback Church.

I wonder if they even realize how insulting to Rick Warren that accusation is. They're basically saying that the respected pastor allowed one of the guys to cheat. And that John McCain, who knows something about honor, went along with that cheating. And that Pastor Warren has perpetuated a cheat on the American people by saying that McCain couldn't hear the questions ahead of time.

The New York Times also covers the controversy, but indicates ultimately that McCain did not overhear Obama speaking (the sequence of interviews was decided by coin toss).

Michael Goldfarb puts all of this in perspective:

Now we know why the Obama campaign has been so reluctant to put their candidate on the same stage as John McCain. The difference between the two last night was striking. While Senator Obama punted on questions of great importance to the American people, and sidestepped even simple questions about whether the United States must defeat evil, John McCain offered the straight talk voters expect of a candidate for President. Senator McCain's responses reflected his long record of bipartisanship, the anecdotes accumulated from a lifetime of service to this country, and the depth of his experience on matters of national security.

The Obama campaign, shocked that John McCain would have the temerity to upstage their celebrity candidate on national television, is now struggling to find an explanation. According to Andrea Mitchell's reporting earlier today on Meet the Press, the only explanation the Obama campaign could come up with was foul play:

“The Obama people must feel that he didn’t do quite as well as they might have wanted to in that context, because what they are putting out privately is that McCain may not have been in the cone of silence and may have had some ability to overhear what the questions were to Obama. He seemed so well-prepared.”

The facts are that Senator McCain was in a motorcade led by the United States Secret Service and held in a green room with no broadcast feed. If the Obama campaign really believes that Senator McCain had some unfair advantage, our offer of weekly town hall forums remains on the table - anyplace, anytime.

Obama backers must be absolutely freaking that their man is barely treading water in public opinion (the race was tied at 44 percent as of Friday).

I've read the spin across the leftosphere all weekend, which suggested McCain couldn't answer a straight question at Saddleback Church. But if the latest allegations of dishonesty are any indicator, it was Obama who was stumped, and it's now perfectly clear who really took home the trophy on Saturday.

Responding to the Russian Challenge

It's by now clear that for all the chest-thumping over Russian aggression in Georgia, the immediate risk of great power escalation is remote: Russia is a nuclear-state, the U.S. has major military operations currently underway in Afghansitan and Iraq, and Moscow may engage in self-restraint to consolidate its power short of larger international condemnation.

That being the case, I'm intrigued by the diplomatic advice offered by Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was national security advisor under former President Jimmy Carter:

The West needs to respond to Russia's aggression in a clear and determined manner. That doesn't mean with force. Nor should it fall into a new cold war with Russia. But the West, particularly the U.S., should continue to mobilize the international community to condemn Russia's behavior....

It is premature to specify what precise measures the West should adopt. But Russia must be made to understand that it is in danger of becoming ostracized internationally. This should be a matter of considerable concern to Russia's new business élite, who are increasingly vulnerable to global financial pressure. Russia's powerful oligarchs have hundreds of billions of dollars in Western bank accounts. They would stand to lose a great deal in the event of a Cold War–style standoff that could conceivably result, at some stage, in the West's freezing of such holdings.

At some point, the West should consider the Olympic option. If the issue of Georgia's territorial integrity is not adequately resolved (by, for example, the deployment in South Ossetia and Abkhazia of a truly independent international security force replacing Russian troops), the U.S. should contemplate withdrawing from the 2014 Winter Games, to be held in the Russian city of Sochi, next to the violated Georgia's frontier. There is a precedent for this. I was part of the Carter Administration when we brandished the Olympic torch as a symbolic weapon in 1980, pulling out of the Summer Games in Moscow after the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. The Soviet Union had planned a propaganda show reminiscent of Hitler's 1936 Olympics in Berlin. America's boycott delivered a body blow to President Leonid Brezhnev and his communist system and prevented Moscow from enjoying a world-class triumph.

Reading this, it's frankly no surprise that Soviet tanks rolled into Kabul during President Carter's watch in 1979.

2014 is still some time away, but if the U.S. wanted to bring about a new Cold War, what better way than to revive the Olympic tradition of boycotting Russia's games? Maybe a President Obama will don a cardigan and ask Americans to turn down the thermostat to 68 degrees as well. Meanwhile, Americans could watch Russian tanks roll from Tsbilisi to Baku, the capital city of Azerbaijan, not to mention Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan. Moscow could place a strategic stranglehold on the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, which sends crude oil supplies to Southeastern Europe, and it could begin to incorporate the former Muslim republics at the southern Russia periphery back into Moscow's sovereign control.

All of this, while remote, is a reminder that U.S. diplomacy and soft-power may be limited in meeting the rising challenges of great power politics. Ideas and institutions may take us part of the way in managing the rise of revanchist autocracies, but at some point preserving the autonomy of nations of the democratic West may require not just the exertion of neoliberal "confidence-building measures" (or boycotts), but hard military capabilities as well.

These considerations give added urgency to the debate in the U.S. over the redeployment of American troops from Iraq. Perhaps a debate over "permanent bases" in the Middle East and South Asia might not be such a bad thing after all?

The Limits of American Power in the Caucasus

Michael Dobbs offers a balanced, big-picture analysis of American capabilities and interests vis-à-vis Russia's military action against Georgia (via Duck of Minerva). Putin is not Hitler, and Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili is not Thomas Jefferson:

When it comes to apportioning blame for the latest flare-up in the Caucasus, there's plenty to go around. The Russians were clearly itching for a fight, but the behavior of Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili has been erratic and provocative. The United States may have stoked the conflict by encouraging Saakashvili to believe that he enjoyed American protection, when the West's ability to impose its will in this part of the world is actually quite limited.

Let us examine the role played by the three main parties.

Georgia. Saakashvili's image in the West, and particularly in the United States, is that of the great "democrat," the leader of the "Rose Revolution" who spearheaded a popular uprising against former American favorite Eduard Shevardnadze in November 2003. It is true that he has won two reasonably free elections, but he has also displayed some autocratic tendencies: He sent riot police to crush an opposition protest in Tbilisi last November and shuttered an opposition television station.

While the United States views Saakashvili as a pro-Western modernizer, a large part of his political appeal in Georgia has stemmed from his promise to reunify Georgia by bringing the secessionist provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia under central control. He has presented himself as the successor to the medieval Georgian king David the Builder and promised that the country will regain its lost territories by the time he leaves office, by one means or another. American commentators tend to overlook the fact that Georgian democracy is inextricably intertwined with Georgian nationalism.

The restoration of Georgia's traditional borders is an understandable goal for a Georgian leader, but it is a much lower priority for the West, particularly if it involves armed conflict with Russia. Based on their previous experience with Georgian rule, Ossetians and Abkhazians have perfectly valid reasons to oppose reunification with Georgia, even if it means throwing in their lot with the Russians.

It is unclear how the simmering tensions between Georgia and South Ossetia came to the boil this month. The Georgians say that they were provoked by the shelling of Georgian villages from Ossetian-controlled territory. While this may well be the case, the Georgian response was disproportionate. On the night of Aug. 7 and into Aug. 8, Saakashvili ordered an artillery barrage against Tskhinvali and sent an armored column to occupy the town. He apparently hoped that Western support would protect Georgia from major Russian retaliation, even though Russian "peacekeepers" were almost certainly killed or wounded in the Georgian assault.

It was a huge miscalculation. Russian Prime minister Vladimir Putin (and let there be no doubt that he is calling the shots in Moscow despite having handed over the presidency to his protege, Dmitri Medvedev) now had the ideal pretext for settling scores with the uppity Georgians. Rather than simply restoring the status quo ante, Russian troops moved into Georgia proper, cutting the main east-west highway at Gori and attacking various military bases.

Saakashvili's decision to gamble everything on a lightning grab for Tskhinvali brings to mind the comment of the 19th-century French statesman Talleyrand: "It was worse than a crime, it was a mistake."

Russia. Putin and Medvedev have defended their incursion into Georgia as motivated by a desire to stop the "genocide" of Ossetians by Georgians. It is difficult to take their moral outrage very seriously. There is a striking contrast between Russian support for the right of Ossetian self-determination in Georgia and the brutal suppression of Chechens who were trying to exercise that very same right within the boundaries of Russia.

Playing one ethnic group against another in the Caucasus has been standard Russian policy ever since czarist times. It is the ideal wedge issue for the Kremlin, particularly in the case of a state such as Georgia, which is made up of several different nationalities. It would be virtually impossible for South Ossetia to survive as an autonomous entity without Russian support. Putin's government has issued passports to Ossetians and secured the appointment of Russians to key positions in Tskhinvali.

The Russian incursion into Georgia proper has been even more "disproportionate" -- in President Bush's phrase -- than the Georgian assault on Tskhinvali. The Russians have made no secret of their wish to replace Saakashvili with a more compliant leader. Russian military targets included the Black Sea port of Poti -- more than 100 miles from South Ossetia.

The real goal of Kremlin strategy is to reassert Russian influence in a part of the world that has been regarded, by czars and commissars alike, as Russia's backyard. Russian leaders bitterly resented the eastward expansion of NATO to include Poland and the Baltic states -- with Ukraine and Georgia next on the list -- but were unable to do very much about it as long as America was strong and Russia was weak. Now the tables are turning for the first time since the collapse of communism in 1991, and Putin is seizing the moment.

If Putin is smart, he will refrain from occupying Georgia proper, a step that would further alarm the West and unite Georgians against Russia. A better tactic would be to wait for Georgians themselves to turn against Saakashvili. The precedent here is what happened to Gamsakhurdia, who was overthrown in January 1992 by the same militia forces he had sent into South Ossetia a year earlier.

The United States. The Bush administration has been sending mixed messages to its Georgian friends. U.S. officials insist that they did not give the green light to Saakashvili for his attack on South Ossetia. At the same time, however, the United States has championed NATO membership for Georgia, sent military advisers to bolster the Georgian army and demanded the restoration of Georgian territorial integrity. American support might well have emboldened Saakashvili as he was considering how to respond to the "provocations" from South Ossetia.

Now the United States has ended up in a situation in the Caucasus where the Georgian tail is wagging the NATO dog. We were unable to control Saakashvili or to lend him effective assistance when his country was invaded. One lesson is that we need to be very careful in extending NATO membership, or even the promise of membership, to countries that we have neither the will nor the ability to defend.

In the meantime, American leaders have paid little attention to Russian diplomatic concerns, both inside the former borders of the Soviet Union and farther abroad. The Bush administration unilaterally abrogated the 1972 anti-missile defense treaty and ignored Putin when he objected to Kosovo independence on the grounds that it would set a dangerous precedent. It is difficult to explain why Kosovo should have the right to unilaterally declare its independence from Serbia, while the same right should be denied to places such as South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

The bottom line is that the United States is overextended militarily, diplomatically and economically. Even hawks such as Vice President Cheney, who have been vociferously denouncing Putin's actions in Georgia, have no stomach for a military conflict with Moscow. The United States is bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan and needs Russian support in the coming trial of strength with Iran over its nuclear ambitions.

Instead of speaking softly and wielding a big stick, as Teddy Roosevelt recommended, the American policeman has been loudly lecturing the rest of the world while waving an increasingly unimpressive baton. The events of the past few days serve as a reminder that our ideological ambitions have greatly exceeded our military reach, particularly in areas such as the Caucasus, which is of only peripheral importance to the United States but of vital interest to Russia.

While I agree that American power is limited in affecting outcomes in the Georgian crisis through hard power alone, I disagree that the extension of Russian hegemony and nationalism to its old southern frontier represents a "peripheral" matter for American national security.

Russia power is now impinging on the upper-tier of the Middle East, and the Caucasus is already home to some of the world's most abundant petroleum resources.

The U.S. has maintained strategic interests in the region for decades. While a resort to force is not likely, American presidents have not written-off the region as inconsequential to international security concerns.