In written answers to questions posed by the Senate Armed Services Committee, where he will testify today, Petraeus said the possibility of military action against Iran should be retained as a “last resort.” But he said the United States “should make every effort to engage by use of the whole of government, developing further leverage rather than simply targeting discrete threats.”
Energy watchdog says Supplies May Plateau Below Expected Demand:
The world’s premier energy monitor is preparing a sharp downward revision of its oil-supply forecast, a shift that reflects deepening pessimism over whether oil companies can keep abreast of booming demand.
The Paris-based International Energy Agency is in the middle of its first attempt to comprehensively assess the condition of the world’s top 400 oil fields. Its findings won’t be released until November, but the bottom line is already clear: Future crude supplies could be far tighter than previously thought.
A pessimistic supply outlook from the IEA could further rattle an oil market that already has seen crude prices rocket over $130 a barrel, double what they were a year ago. U.S. benchmark crude broke a record for the fourth day in a row, rising 3.3% Wednesday to close at $133.17 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange.
For several years, the IEA has predicted that supplies of crude and other liquid fuels will arc gently upward to keep pace with rising demand, topping 116 million barrels a day by 2030, up from around 87 million barrels a day currently. Now, the agency is worried that aging oil fields and diminished investment mean that companies could struggle to surpass 100 million barrels a day over the next two decades.
On the Friday before the 2004 presidential election, Osama bin Laden released a videotape slamming George W. Bush, which more than a few people took as a tacit endorsement of John Kerry. The CIA saw it differently, though. According to Ron Suskind’s fine book, The One Percent Doctrine, Deputy Director John McLaughlin said, “Bin Laden certainly did a nice favor today for the President.” It seemed obvious to the top CIA analysts that bin Laden wanted to keep Bush — who had let the terrorists off the hook in Afghanistan and launched the war in Iraq, a great recruiting tool for al-Qaeda — in power.
Which raises the question: Who are the bad guys rooting for in 2008? John McCain would have you believe the answer is clear. Barack Obama wants to meet with the leaders of enemy states, especially Iran, “which would increase their prestige,” McCain says, and convey the impression of American weakness. To punctuate the point, McCain persistently barks that Obama wants to meet with the Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a flagrant anti-Semite but a relatively powerless figurehead. Obama did say during a debate last summer that he would meet with foreign leaders without preconditions. “He shorthanded the answer,” Senator Joe Biden recently said. Ever since, Obama has been creatively fuzzy when asked directly if he would meet with Ahmadinejad — and he has begun to point out that the real leaders of Iran are the clerics led by the Supreme Leader Ayatullah Ali Khamenei, who controls Iran’s foreign policy and its nuclear program. Obama has also been explicit about the need to start with lower-level talks, a presidential summit coming only if there were progress in those negotiations. In his previous, straight-talking incarnation, McCain would have allowed Obama the modifications to his shorthand answer and debated the issue on the merits. Not this year.
When I asked McCain on May 19 why he kept linking Obama to Ahmadinejad, he said that Ahmadinejad represents Iran at the U.N., which is a fair point, and that the “average American” thinks he’s the leader of Iran, which he isn’t. Indeed, it could be argued that McCain’s Ahmadinejad obsession “increases the prestige” of a relatively powerless loudmouth for domestic political gain. Linking Obama to the world’s most famous anti-Semite certainly doesn’t hurt McCain among Jewish retirees in Florida, a swing state. In any case, don’t be surprised if Ahmadinejad pulls a bin Laden and “denounces” McCain just before the election this year.
Why? Because the last thing Iran’s leaders want is an American President who doesn’t play the role of the Great Satan. They need the mirage of an implacable, saber-rattling foe to distract their population from the utter incompetence of their government. An American President who said, “Let’s talk,” would lead an awful lot of Iranians to ask their leaders, “Why aren’t you talking?” That was certainly the case after the reformer Mohammed Khatami won a surprise landslide election to become the Iranian President in 1997. The Clinton Administration began making quiet diplomatic overtures toward Khatami, and a handshake between Clinton and him was choreographed for the 2000 U.N. General Assembly meeting — but Khatami backed out at the last minute, under pressure from his clerical superiors. In recent Iranian elections, the mullahs have made sure that reformers like Khatami were ineligible to run for the presidency and the Iranian parliament — although there are indications that Khamenei considers Ahmadinejad to be an unnecessarily bellicose embarrassment as well.
This recent history provides sobering lessons for both Obama and McCain. For Obama, it demonstrates just how difficult any attempt to engage Iran’s leaders will be. A more prudent course would probably be to ignore Iran at first and try to engage Syria, which has been dropping all sorts of hints that it is ready to talk to both the U.S. and Israel. For McCain, the lesson is the opposite: Why on earth does he want to keep making the same mistake Bush did and play the caricature Great Satan? A more prudent course would be to stow the tough-guy rhetoric, appear more reasonable, while aggressively — militarily — going after the violent jihadis in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere.
That doesn’t seem to be McCain’s way, however. He is all bluster and impatience. If nothing else, his assault on Obama has renewed questions about whether McCain has the temperament to be President. A few years ago, in friendlier times, the Senator and I talked about the Cuban missile crisis. At a crucial moment, John F. Kennedy received two messages from the Soviets — one bellicose, one accommodating. He chose to ignore the bellicose message and very likely saved the world. “You probably would’ve chosen the wrong message,” I teased McCain. “I probably would have,” he laughed. He was joking, but given his behavior of late, you’ve got to wonder.
On Friday, the campaign will allow a small pool of reporters access to the records from 7 a.m. to 10 a.m. Pacific time in a conference room at the Copper Wind Resort in Phoenix, near the Mayo Clinic Scottsdale. The reporters will be allowed to take notes but not remove or photocopy the records. Campaign officials said they were imposing the restrictions to prevent the actual records from wide dissemination.
Around the same time, campaign officials said, they will post medical summaries of each year from 2000 to 2008 on the campaign Web site. The summaries will not include doctors’ notes in the actual records.
The news organizations in the pool, selected by the campaign, include ABC News, The Arizona Republic, The Associated Press, Bloomberg, CBS News, CNN, Fox News, NBC News, Reuters, The Washington Post and, possibly, a newsmagazine.
Each organization is allowed two representatives and is expected to file a “pool report” for other reporters detailing the information in the records.
At 11 a.m. Pacific time, the campaign said, Mr. McCain’s doctors will be available to all reporters in a 90-minute conference call.
McCain’s attacks on Lobbyists may be more for show:
Five lobbyists have resigned from the McCain campaign, causing many other Washington lobbyists to ask: “So this is the thanks we get?” Said one McCain supporter: “I find it a little offensive. It was good enough to get my $2,300 donation. If we’re not good enough, then send my check back. It pisses me off.” But McCain still has 115 lobbyists raising money and helping to run his campaign. And apparently, they all understand McCain’s anti-lobbyist efforts are simply for show:
At 4 p.m. Monday, campaign finance chair Susan Nelson convened a conference call with lobbyist supporters and fundraisers to assuage their bruised egos and pass along positive polling data, according to two participants in the session.
“I think they were trying to make the point that this is not an attack on lobbying or any of the people on the campaign,” said one participant in the conference call, speaking on condition of anonymity. “They want to move forward. My sense is everyone gets the joke.”
A McCain fundraiser said it’s hard “getting enthusiastic about McCain because there’s this long history of kind of castigating the lobbying community while hanging around the lobbyists.”
Senator Webb believes that an attack on Iran is desired by the administration before the elections:
Last year, Sen. Jim Webb (D-VA) proposed legislation that would have required the President Bush to “seek congressional authorization prior to commencing any broad military action in Iran,” but the amendment failed in the Senate. On NPR’s Fresh Air yesterday, host Terri Gross asked Webb about the bill and if he thinks “the Bush administration is considering a military strike” before Bush leaves office.
“It certainly seems that it’s on the table,” replied Webb, noting that some in the administration are pushing for it:GROSS: You also introduced a bill that failed to require congressional approval before any military action in Iran. Do you think the Bush administration is considering a military strike against Iran before President Bush leaves office?
WEBB: Well, it certainly seems that it’s on the table. That there are people in the administration who would like to see that happen.
Clinton Says She’s Willing To Take Fight To Convention
The AP reports on Clinton’s latest proclamations about how long she plans to contest the Democratic nomination:
In an interview Wednesday with The Associated Press, Clinton said she is willing to take her fight to seat Florida’s and Michigan’s delegates to the convention if the two states want to go that far.
Asked whether she would support the states if they appeal an unfavorable rules committee decision to the convention floor, the former first lady replied:
“Yes I will. I will, because I feel very strongly about this.”
“I will consult with Floridians and the voters in Michigan because it’s really their voices that are being ignored and their votes that are being discounted, and I’ll support whatever the elected officials and the voters in those two states want to do.”
Taking her battle to the convention would fly in the face of an increasing number of party leaders who say the contest needs to be wrapped up shortly after the last primary on June 3 to prepare adequately for the fall election.
Asked if she now envisioned the race extending beyond June 3, Clinton replied: “It could, I hope it doesn’t. I hope it’s resolved to everyone’s satisfaction by that date, because that’s what people are expecting, but we’ll have to see what happens.”
In other remarks made Wednesday Clinton continued to press her case for the nomination, intensifying her language by comparing the Florida and Michigan recount to the Civil Rights movement. As the Politico first reported:
Hillary Clinton compared her effort to seat Florida and Michigan delegates to epic American struggles, including those to free the slaves and win the right to vote for blacks and women.[...]
“This work to extend the franchise to all of our citizens is a core mission of the modern Democratic party,” she said. “From signing the Voting Rights Act and fighting racial discrimination at the ballot box to lowering the voting age so those old enough to fight and die in war would have the right to choose their commander in chief, to fighting for multi-lingual ballots so you can make your voice heard no matter what language you speak.”
Some of the things that happened while I was sleeping:
Seems that John Hagee, one of McCain’s backers, a man whose endorsment McCains sought out, has praised Hitler as a servant of God:
John Hagee, the controversial evangelical leader and endorser of Sen. John McCain, argued in a late 1990s sermon that the Nazis had operated on God’s behalf to chase the Jews from Europe and shepherd them to Palestine. According to the Reverend, Adolph Hitler was a “hunter,” sent by God, who was tasked with expediting God’s will of having the Jews re-establish a state of Israel.
Going in and out of biblical verse, Hagee preached: “‘And they the hunters should hunt them,’ that will be the Jews. ‘From every mountain and from every hill and from out of the holes of the rocks.’ If that doesn’t describe what Hitler did in the holocaust you can’t see that.”
He goes on: “Theodore Hertzel is the father of Zionism. He was a Jew who at the turn of the 19th century said, this land is our land, God wants us to live there. So he went to the Jews of Europe and said ‘I want you to come and join me in the land of Israel.’ So few went that Hertzel went into depression. Those who came founded Israel; those who did not went through the hell of the holocaust.
“Then god sent a hunter. A hunter is someone with a gun and he forces you. Hitler was a hunter. And the Bible says — Jeremiah writing — ‘They shall hunt them from every mountain and from every hill and from the holes of the rocks,’ meaning there’s no place to hide. And that might be offensive to some people but don’t let your heart be offended. I didn’t write it, Jeremiah wrote it. It was the truth and it is the truth. How did it happen? Because God allowed it to happen. Why did it happen? Because God said my top priority for the Jewish people is to get them to come back to the land of Israel.”
McCain goes After Obama on Negotiations and Iraq, and Obama responds:
John McCain just issued a statement where he went for a double-whammy: slamming Obama for wanting to negotiate with tyrants while trying to paint him as inconsistent:
After Senator Obama’s own advisors and supporters backtracked from his stated desire to hold summit meetings with the leaders of the world’s worst regimes, Senator Obama himself has begun to reinterpret his stand. He now claims that some ‘fear’ to ‘negotiate’ with the likes of Iranian President Ahmadinejad, who has called Israel a ’stinking corpse’ or Ayatollah Khamenei, who called Israel a ‘cancerous tumor.’ I have news for Senator Obama: I have met some very bad people before in my life. It is not fear that drives my opposition to unconditional meetings with Ahmadinejad, Khamenei, Kim Jong Il, and Raul Castro; rather it is my clear understanding that such a course will fail to eliminate the threat posed by these rogue regimes.
(The new mention of Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader, comes after a scathing blog post by Time columnist Joe Klein yesterday where he wrote, “Why doesn’t the McCain campaign and other assorted Republicans ever accuse Obama of wanting to negotiate with Khamenei? Well, because Khamenei isn’t quite the flagrant anti-Semite Ahmadinejad is…and, as we keep hearing, Obama has a Jewish problem.”)
McCain also doubles down on the war, pushing against Obama’s opposition to the surge in Iraq – which he frames as a product of inexperience. “Senator Obama has consistently offered his judgment on Iraq, and he has been consistently wrong. He said that General Petraeus’ new strategy would not reduce sectarian violence, but would worsen it. He was wrong.”
It’s an interesting tack, considering that the reports of the surge’s effects have failed to dampen opposition to the war.
UPDATE: Obama’s response –
While I always appreciate hearing the news from John McCain, he should explain to the American people why almost every single promise and prediction that he has made about Iraq has turned to be catastrophically wrong, including his support for a surge that was supposed to achieve political reconciliation. While John McCain offers his poor judgment in supporting George Bush’s war and a failed foreign policy that has left us less secure, I will continue to make the case for a new foreign policy that deploys all elements of American power – including tough, principled and direct diplomacy. It’s stunning that in such a lengthy written statement, John McCain could not articulate a single new idea that hasn’t been tried – and failed – over the last eight years.
Arlen Specter seems to agree with Obama on Negotiations:
Pennsylvania Republican Senator Arlen Specter spoke favorably this morning of Obama’s diplomatic approach. He just thinks McCain — whose candidacy he supports — should be doing the talking:
The Pennsylvanian, who has long championed sit-downs with enemies of the United States, told The Morning Call today that the country needs “a very fundamental shift in our thinking in our international diplomacy.”
“I’m not going to disagree with McCain, I’m going to tell him what I think,” Specter said. “I had some good talks with … [Yasser] Arafat and [Col. Muammar] Qaddafi and [Fidel] Castro.”
Specter has met with Syrian president Bashar al-Assad in recent years, in defiance of the Bush administration. Three years ago, he met with Venezuela president Hugo Chavez.
“I had a good talk with Chavez,” he said, pointing to a photograph of the two together in August 2005, one of many pictures of himself with foreign leaders that adorn his office walls. “We made some progress on some of the drug problems.”
Still, Specter shied away from endorsing the prospect of Obama himself meeting with such leaders, as well as Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and North Korea leader Kim Jong-il. He spoke with three Pennsylvania reporters in his Capitol office.
“I don’t know exactly how Obama is going to handle it. Obama does not have my experience or McCain’s experience,” he said.
Another Lobbyist problem for McCain:
John McCain’s top foreign policy adviser lobbied the Arizona senator’s staff on behalf of the republic of Georgia while he was working for the campaign, public records show.
Randy Scheunemann, founder of Orion Strategies, represented the governments of Macedonia, Georgia and Taiwan between 2003 and March 1, according to the firm’s filings with the Justice Department. In its latest semiannual report, the firm disclosed that Scheunemann had a phone conversation in November about Georgia with Richard Fontaine, an aide in McCain’s Senate office.
Orion Strategies earned $540,000 from its foreign clients over the year ending on Dec. 1, reports show. Scheunemann also received $56,250 last year from March to July from McCain, according to campaign finance records.
The campaign consulting fees ended at a time when McCain was under financial pressure to cut costs, but Scheunemann remained the campaign’s top foreign policy adviser. He represented McCain throughout last fall — including an appearance at a Republican Jewish Coalition event during the same week he lobbied McCain’s Senate office.
While not illegal or a breach of Senate ethics rules, Scheunemann’s lobbying of McCain’s staff as he was advising the campaign comes to light a week after McCain announced a new policy to avoid such conflicts. The new conflict-of-interest policy prohibits campaign workers from being registered lobbyists or foreign agents and bans part-time volunteers from policy discussions on issues involving their clients.
McCain’s stance on GI bill isn’t winning him any fans:
Of all the voting groups John McCain will target this fall, none would seem like more of a sure thing than this country’s war veterans. So why is the celebrated Vietnam War hero and POW bracing for a potentially bad week with so many men and women who have served in uniform?
The point of contention between the two seemingly natural allies is a piece of legislation the Senate is expected to vote on this week to update the 1944 G.I. Bill to provide expanded education assistance and opportunities to the armed forces. The bill, co-sponsored by two other Vietnam veterans in the Senate, Republican Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and Democrat Jim Webb of Virginia, would effectively provide full tuition and housing costs at a four-year public university for veterans who have served at least three years of active duty. Given his family’s and his own long and distinguished service career, the bill would seem like a natural fit for the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. But McCain, concerned about the estimated $4 billion annual price tag and the incentive he worries it might give people to leave an already strapped military, has sponsored his own competing proposal. It increases the existing monthly education benefit from around $1,100 to $1,500 a month while adding more generous benefits for those who’ve served more than 12 years.
McCain’s concerns, however, don’t seem to impress the vast majority of veterans’ organizations. They are feverishly lobbying him to support the Webb and Hagel bill, which simply adds the new program’s expense to the $165 billion annual emergency war supplemental, a move President George W. Bush has threatened to veto. (The House version offsets the program by increasing taxes by 0.5% on those individuals who earn more than $500,000 a year and couples who earn more than $1 million, a move also under veto threat.) “This isn’t about anything partisan; we are firmly supporting the bill that does right by the veterans, does right by the troops, and that is not McCain’s bill,” said Ramona Joyce, a spokeswoman for the American Legion. “It could do McCain damage with veteran voters if this issue drags out.”
Even with the current dustup, it’s hard to imagine John McCain not winning the majority of the veterans vote in November. But the nation’s 26 million veterans are by no means a monolithic voting bloc, and any level of disappointment with McCain could sway some undecideds. The Democratic National Committee is already gleefully preparing TV spots about McCain’s position on the Senate bill. And, sensing a vulnerability in McCain’s seemingly greatest strength, some Democratic strategists are already contemplating what other veterans votes they can bring up this year.
