Sy Hersh's Latest Scoop: Guess what, folks! We're goin' to Iran.

In fact, we're already there, says Sy. And our Congress let it happen, often without knowing what it was they were authorizing.
Reviled as they are, Cheney and company are still running the show, and they're making every last minute of their tenure count.

from The New Yorker: Preparing the Battlefield

Someone named Rice talking sense on foreign policy.

No, it's not Condi. It's Susan, Obama's senior foreign policy adviser.

And, no, don't take this to mean I'm jumping on the Obama bandwagon just yet. Hillary has one last shot next Tuesday, and there's a chance she'll pull it off. I put my vote and a relatively generous amount of hard-earned money into her quest, and so I'm sticking with her as long as Tina "Bitch is the new black!" Fey is ;)

But I thought it was about time someone pointed out succinctly, as Ms. Rice does here, how ridiculous this "we won't negotiate with these guys until we retroactively win the negotiations" policy has been.

from Tucker Carlson's show on MSNBC today

RICE: This notion of George Bush's -- and it's really unique to him -- that somehow we are rewarding our adversaries by sitting down and engaging in tough-minded, well-prepared negotiations is one of the many products of his failed presidency.

If John McCain wants to take his foreign policy advice from the most disastrous president in our lifetime, that's his prerogative, but Barack Obama is not going to do that.

CARLSON: But doesn't a meeting with the American head of state have value? It's a commodity. It's worth something.

RICE: No, it's a means to an end.

CARLSON: But isn't it also worth something?

RICE: It is a means to an end, Tucker.

First of all, these negotiations would be well-planned. But we're not going to take the view that the Bush administration has taken, that we're only going to negotiate with our adversaries after they do what it is we seek to accomplish in negotiations.

That's the position we've taken with Iran: we won't sit down and talk to you until you've ended and suspended your nuclear program, which is, of course, what we need them to do.

That's counterproductive. That ensures that we'll never have direct dialogue with Iran, whereas they're continuing their nuclear program unabated. We're having trouble getting sanctions, which we need to push forward on. And we are therefore losing, because time is on the Iranians' side.

Biden's take on Bush & the NIE

Biden's grasp of the situation seems pretty solid to me (not so much his grasp of sentence structure, but then Bush has set the bar pretty low in that regard. I've noted however, that Cheney speaks in perfectly grammatical, discrete sound bites, albeit out of the side of his mouth. Even that has failed to endear him to me, however.)

from Hardball with Chris Matthews this week:

MATTHEWS: Well, this propaganda war that's been fought, now, for years now -- their phrases like "weapons of mass destruction" that you and I never heard of growing up, "regime change," all the rest of it, "homeland," all the rest of the new language we've learned from this crowd that came in a few years ago -- around the late '90s, they started pushing this.

If their motive is not to fight weapons of mass destruction, which don't seem to materialize when they're supposed to in either Iraq or the Iranian case, what is the grand motive for war?

Why did we invade Iraq?

Why were we threatening World War III with Iran?

Why did this administration, Cheney and the president, keep pushing the war?

Why do they always want to fight or scare somebody?

What's it about if it's not weapons?

BIDEN: Let me tell you what I think it's about. I can't prove it. I think it's about our ability to try to dominate that region of the world and control oil.

I don't think we went to war because of oil, but I think there was an absolute belief -- the only thing I can fit together with Cheney and his gang is that they went to war -- they're smarter than they are acting. They're smarter than they are acting.

What they do -- they went to war in the hope that they would be able to do two things; one, have a government that sat on a whole bunch of oil, that still exists in the world...

MATTHEWS: Right.

BIDEN: ... that would be indebted to us.

MATTHEWS: Two, have permanent military bases in Iraq to dominate that part of the world, to be able to control oil, not to go steal it for American oil companies but be able to control the pricing, control the access of it -- a very Machiavellian view.

There's nothing idealistic about Cheney. I don't know what President Bush thinks, but I think he's bought, hook, line, and sinker, the Cheney rationale that the only way for us to be able to be dominant in the 21st century is to use our overwhelming power, in the face of the moral disapprobation of the rest of the world, to threaten the rest of the world, and that's how we'd avoid war in the future.

I think these guys are irresponsible. But the thing that angers me the most -- and it angers me, Chris -- is how incomprehensible it is for anyone to think that the president did not know that his intelligence agencies didn't believe what he was saying.

I believe that's why these guys came out with, now, 16 American intelligence agencies uniting, saying, I'm not going to wear the jacket again on this one.

Bush Quote du Jour: "I did it once; I'll do it again."

This enigmatic quote was apparently passed, real-time, to National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley during Hadley's White House briefing this afternoon via -- who knows? -- mobile texting, a BlackBerry, cranial implants? Just kidding. It was probably a BlackBerry.
The Huffington Post, having missed the audio, understandably attributed it to Mr. Cheney:

QUESTION: Second question. When did the Vice President get briefed on this? Because he was warning of serious consequences just last month, too.

HADLEY: I've just got a note from him -- I did it once, I'll do it again.

But they printed a correction on being told that it was actually referring to the president's reaction, probably to the line by Hadley, found in this transcript from the News & Observer, that was followed by a question about the vice president which Hadley apparently wasn't paying attention to, as he was busy checking out the prez's text:

HADLEY: So again, as the President says many times, we're asking people to do hard things. We're asking people to put pressure on Iran, and it has consequences for their diplomacy, it has consequences for their companies doing business with Iran. People don't like to do that. So I'm sure some people will try and use this as an excuse or a pretext for flagging on the effort.

Our argument is, actually, it should be just the reverse, because we need to keep the halting of the nuclear weapons program in place; we need to achieve the suspension of the enrichment program; and the only way -- what this NIE says is that the best path to do that is to continue what we've been doing, which is diplomatic isolation, U.N. sanctions and other financial pressure, plus the option for negotiations.

QUESTION: Second question. When did the Vice President get briefed on this? Because he was warning of serious consequences just last month, too.

And of course, the occasion of Hadley's briefing was to react to the newly released NIE that reveals Iran halted their nuclear weapons program in 2003.

I wonder if that halting was possibly due to the very early successes in the Iraq war, such as the removal of Saddam, something they didn't want to see repeated in Iran. If we keep having all this "success" over there that we've been having lately, they might just change their minds again.

Coalition of the Willing: Who's Left

from the Boston Globe

Pakistan: Who Saw This Coming?

Just about everyone but the White House and the State Department, it looks like.

No, that's not fair... of course they saw it coming; they just didn't really have the time to spend on the fact that

• one of the world's eight nuclear powers,
• next door to India, a fellow nuclear power who's contributing greatly to the fight against the Taliban in Afghanistan, thus pissing off those in Pakistan who support the Taliban,
  
• ruled by a general who seized power in a coup,
• (and he's the good guy, if you don't count exiled former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, who can't even enter the country without an attempt on her life)
• a good proportion of whose people support the Taliban and view Osama bin Laden as a hero while burning George Bush in effigy (sure, he's not my favorite person, either, but he ranks a lot higher on my list than Osama... not saying much, I know)
• who most likely are sheltering bin Laden, if he's still alive, as well as other top Al Qaida leadership, not because Musharraf wants to, but because he can't control entire regions of his country,
• which recently have come to include his own capital.

So now Musharraf's declared martial law, and speculation is that it has more to do with an upcoming supreme court decision that would have prohibited him from being re-elected in January, than with any other of the overwhelming problems facing his country.

So far, all we've had is a "statement" from our secretary of state, the same person who threw around the term "mushroom cloud" back when it was oh-so-safely hypothetical...

And now let's welcome our very special guest, "a petty and cruel dictator."

I've always been a fan of dwelling comfortably with ambiguity, but Columbia University's president seemed to take it to an extreme today by inviting Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and then discussing him in the introduction pretty much like he wasn't in the room (he had a translator, you know.)

Given the quality of Ahmadinejad's public discourse thus far, just not inviting him would have been a pretty decent decision.

He did offer some historical perspectives that were of merit, like pointing out the hypocrisy of the U.S. with regard to the nuclear issue (to applause) and our tendency to keep memories of the hostage crisis alive while burying those of our complicity in several decades' worth of intervention in Iran, from coups to Saddam's eight-year war against them.

However -- and effusive, flowery language aside -- he also said a bunch of stuff that was frankly unbelievable (painting his nation as a gentle, peace-craving haven of democracy where the press is entirely free, Jews are beloved, and women enjoy dizzy heights of freedom) and some stuff that was just plain nutty, which inevitably casts a shadow of discredit on the entire speech, even the snippets which may have contributed in some small way to a dialog. He and his Western Hemisphere counterpart Chavez are pretty good at doing that.

The excerpt below is probably the nuttiest part (and no, Mr. President, they weren't laughing with you for your remark about living in a straights-only zone. You have your 10 percent non-straights like everyone else, unless you've executed them all out of existence, which is the question you dodged and haven't yet answered. And I'm not sure all of the women in your country consider being "exempt from many responsibilities" as a sign of respect. We tried that argument in the West during the Victorian days, and it didn't quite hold up.)

AHMADINEJAD (THROUGH TRANSLATOR): In Iran, we don't have homosexuals, like in your country.

(LAUGHTER)

We don't have that in our country.

(AUDIENCE BOOING)

AHMADINEJAD (THROUGH TRANSLATOR): In Iran, we do not have this phenomenon. I don't know who's told you that we have it.

(LAUGHTER)

But, as for women, maybe you think that being a woman is a crime. It's not a crime to be a woman.

Women are the best creatures created by God. They represent the kindness, the beauty that God instills in them. Women are respected in Iran. In Iran, every family who is given a girl is given -- in every Iranian family who has a girl, they are 10 times happier than having a son. Women are respected more than men are.

They are exempt from many responsibilities. Many of the legal responsibilities rest on the shoulders of men in our society because of the respect, culturally given, to women, to the future mothers.

Iraq likes Iran way more than us, it seems...

... if pictures don't lie, and based on today's notorious snub of Bush by al-Maliki, which may have something to do with this, as well as that leaked national security adviser memo.