Category: National

To anyone who believes the key to winning the war against Islamic terrorism is nothing less than full-fledged global cooperation, the recent bold comments by Jose Maria Aznar had to be encouraging.

Aznar, the former prime minister of Spain, advocated a much more active role for NATO. Its raison d’etre today, declared Aznar, must be “to defeat Islamist terror.”

In a widely-circulated editorial piece, Aznar said, “Jihadism has replaced communism, as communism replaced Nazism as a mortal danger, so NATO must put defense against Islamist terrorism at the center of its strategy.” He also urged NATO to develop a homeland security dimension “if it wants to remain relevant to the strategic demands of our time.”

What surely took a lot of Europeans aback, however, was his call for a further expansion of NATO’s membership. He wants more countries that share the values of “liberal democracies,” and he wants the geographical base broadened. NATO, said Aznar, should invite Japan, Australia and Israel as full members and offer a strategic association to Colombia and India.

Israel in NATO?

The things you can say when you’re no longer in office.

Maybe Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa. and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, missed the limelight between Supreme Court confirmation hearings. Or maybe the erstwhile Philadelphia district attorney has a soft spot for that city’s pro athletes.

Surely his interest in the Terrell Owens case cannot be a function of a legitimate Senate priority.

To recap for those fortunate to otherwise not know of Owens, he is the superbly talented, eminently arrogant, destructively self-centered pro football player who had, until last month, been playing for the Philadelphia Eagles. He’s a poster boy for all that is wrong and warped about having prominent athletes as cultural icons.

Owens was suspended by the Eagles without pay for four games for “conduct detrimental to the team,” which is shorthand for embarrassing the organization and causing an implosive chasm in the locker room. He was then deactivated (with pay) after the suspension ended. An arbitrator sided with the team.

Specter initially threatened to have a Senate subcommittee look into whether the NFL and the Eagles had violated anti-trust laws. But he settled for bringing it to the attention of the Department of Justice.

Two points.

First, this is a collective bargaining matter, and the arbitrator ruled accordingly.

Second, it should be demeaning to the Senate and trivializing to the Justice Department to traffick in such legal dreck. Isn’t that Ralph Nader’s job?

There may be no more sobering comment on the times we’re living in than the ongoing debate about torture. As in two sides. As in: Wasn’t there a time when torture would have been about as suitable a topic for “debate” as pedophilia? Or the Holocaust? Or Jim Crow laws? Can there really be a “pro” position?

Would that those days were still with us.

Having said that, however, it’s necessary to say this. Let’s dispense with all of the euphemisms, circumlocutions and disingenuous parsing about outsourcing. In a war sans civilizational rules on one side, the United States would be derelict to permit the ultimate immorality: a horrific, World Trade Towers-dwarfing, mass-casualty attack without using every means of deterrence in its arsenal. Including, alas and as a last resort, the “T” word.

If “water-boarding” Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the nefarious brains behind 9/11, can prevent future acts of mass terror – and it arguably already has – then so be it. And so, do it. Let Mohammed take one for our team. And let’s not bother to torture the lexicon with some “aggressive interrogation” newspeak. Whatever it pragmatically takes to save the innocent. The ends are that important.

And, no, this is not immoral equivalency, unless Mohammed’s dunk tank is equated with heinously barbaric mass murder. This is not stooping to “their level” unless humiliation is equated with videoed beheadings. And this is not rationalized vengeance. This is defending yourself, your loved ones and everybody else’s loved ones from the heretofore unthinkable by using all the non-nuclear means at your disposal.

While the United States shouldn’t proffer a policy that precludes expedience to save lives, neither can it countenance the rogue messes we’ve seen. Abu Ghraib is a grim reminder of what can happen when an ill-prepared army of occupation lets loose a bunch of untrained losers on captives.

We’re also reminded that there are generic — often dragneted — captives – and then there are real intelligence targets. And the latter still requires an approach that is sophisticated – not sadistic. The unconscionable irony of Abu Ghraib is that no lives were going to be saved because Lynndie England had a new leash on life. But American lives were surely forfeited because Abu Ghraib turned into an Islamic recruiting coup.

One final point: Bona fide intelligence targets do not deserve the legitimacy that Geneva Convention protections would confer. Not unless the rationale is that terrorists posing as ambulance drivers and police officers are POWs.

It still remains to be seen what the long-term effects will be of the Amman atrocities ordered up by Jordanian-born terrorist mastermind Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The aftermath of the hotel suicide bombings, which took 59 civilian lives including celebrants at a wedding reception, prompted a groundswell of local anger against Zarqawi.

A recent audio tape by Zarqawi then added a new twist. He said the bombers were not actually directed to blow up any wedding parties. His marginal “my bad,” however, was delivered with back-handed arrogance. “We did not and will not think for one moment to target them,” he acknowledged, “even if they were people of immorality and debauchery.”

The civilized world now waits to see if the Jordanian – and any other Arab – “street” will ultimately let Zarcoward get away with a jihadi “oops.”

With his popularity ratings now spiraling into unprecedented, second-term depths, the president had hoped that last week’s foray to the Summit of the Americans in Argentina would at least prove diversionary. What it proved, however, is that changing context and continents no longer works. At least not for George W. Bush.

While it got Libby-gate out of the news, the sojourn south was superceded by something much more serious: the realization that the perception of this president – and, much more importantly, this country — is costing us across the foreign-policy board. Big time.

Flying to Mar Del Plata was not a strategy for looking presidential and burnishing an embattled image. Not when your sheer presence provokes well-chronicled, globally-transmitted, anti-American street protests that include burning flags and Hitlerized effigies.

It was a reminder that a large portion of the world – not just “Old” Europe and the Middle East “street” — doesn’t see the Iraqi occupation as a necessary front in the war against terrorism. They perceive an increasingly unilateral, arrogant and pre-emptive hegemon. This is beyond PR nightmare.

As for the Summit, per se, the invasion of Iraq rekindled the bad old days of “gunboat diplomacy” a century ago. It also helped revive memories of U.S. intervention in Latin American sovereign affairs – from Guatemala in the 1950s and Cuba in the ’60s to Chile in the ’70s and Nicaragua in the ’80s. And no one will convince Venezuela’s populist powder keg, Hugo Chavez, that Pat Robertson is the only American who wants him cashiered from this life. It’s not a quantum leap for know-nothing socialists to blame everything on Uncle Scapegoat. Iraq just makes it easier.

Such volatile geopolitics helps Chavez dust off the old anti-imperialist rhetoric. It also reminds other leaders – more of whom have been leaning left of late – that now is not the time to appear to be in the pocket of the U.S.

And that arguably and regrettably works to the detriment of Latin America — historically enamored of big government and wary of capitalism — as well as the U.S.

Even with allowances for our farm subsidies, there were still enough reasons for Latin American economies to sign on to the United States-supported free trade agreement. Substantially lowering – or eliminating – two-way tariffs and streamlining customs is still a net benefit with job-creation implications. It would not have overcome, of course, onerous taxes, stifling over-regulation, obstructionist labor unions, entrenched monopolies and endemic corruption, but it would have helped.

In fact, a majority were willing to move ahead, but if Argentina and Brazil aren’t with you, nothing happens.

And nothing happened. Except the refutation of an old political axiom about presidents hitting the international low road to help ride out domestic turmoil.

Much has been made of the irony of Lewis “Scooter” Libby’s indictment.

He’s charged with lying to cover up an ostensible non-crime, the leaking of a covert CIA agent’s identity. And that’s a fair assessment. It’s questionable that his out-of-school media prattling about Valerie Plame could survive the parsing of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982 or the 1917 Espionage Act.

But this isn’t, as partisans and some pundits would have it, merely a case of “criminalizing politics.”

Perjury is serious, felonious stuff, as Special Prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald took pains to point out. Whether it’s a “truck driver paying bribes in Chicago” or powerful Washington insiders dropping character-assassination dimes. It’s not some prosecutorial consolation prize or a “technicality,” he underscored, unless right and wrong, lying and truth-telling are fundamentally immaterial to our system.

But the Libby “lying” is not classic irony. It’s classic presidential administration – any administration – hardball politics and blind loyalty. The dark side of Capitol culture. It’s G. Gordon Liddy with a better pedigree.

Liddy, the Watergate expediter, once explained what it was all about.

It’s about “power,” he declaimed, and what you do to “get it” and what you do to “keep it,” because your partisan cause and your country are worth it. It’s true believers and power trippers not taking prisoners if they don’t have to.

It’s an amoral context at the top, where dirty tricks are a given, some dirtier than others. In Liddy’s case, from compromising opposition candidates with call girls to assigning burglars to the Watergate headquarters of the Democratic Party chairman. Co-opting any chance of a McGovern Administration was worth any price. If America had to be saved from itself, so be it. It’s no quantum leap to blindsiding those denouncing a key rationale for war.

The ends justified the means, however unethical, however sleazy, however, if necessary, criminal.

It didn’t start with Liddy; it won’t end with Libby.

Speculation continues apace about what President Bush can do to get his pre-Libby, Miers, Katrina, Social Security, budget deficits, Iraq insurgency and WMD mojo back.

One consensus is that he has to “reconnect” with the American people. As a generic strategy, it means getting back to basics and reminding the electorate of who you are and what you were saying when you were initially elected. Ronald Reagan is often cited as a precedent in his recovery from Iran-Contra.

Only one problem. The scenarios couldn’t be more different.

At his core, Reagan was a pleasant fatherland figure and personally liked even by ideological adversaries. From the start, he waxed on about “morning in America.” The nostalgia card played well.

He also had the perfect partner, Mikhail Gorbachev, in sun-setting the Cold War. And Reagan was juxtaposed to the malaise-connoting Jimmy Carter, hardly a tough act to follow.

Bush’s presidential roots hearken back to the embittering, divisive controversy that was Bush-Gore. We’re also reminded that George W. Bush was a self-defined “uniter, not a divider.” Moreover, he would see to it that “honor” would be restored to the White House. And his administration would be “open,” with a focus on what was “right,” not just what was “legal.”

Bush, of course, is not avuncular, which is not a problem. But neither, alas, is he presidential. He still has his frat boy, “Heckuva job, Brownie” moments when he goes off script.

We also know that before “neo-con” became part of the political parlance, Iraqi “regime change” was on the table – well before Sept. 11, 2001.

Not that there isn’t nostalgia.

We do remember Colin Powell before he was a kept man and Condoleezza Rice before she was steamrolled into irrelevance by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. And recall wistfully when Karl Rove was merely “Bush’s brain” – not his moral compass.

Then there’s the other consensus. It calls for a Reaganesque shake-up of Bush’s inner circle. Perhaps a latter-day Howard Baker will appear to keep the political hordes at bay and buy some time and credibility. But that seems a long shot. Washington is deus ex machina -challenged these days.

Unless Patrick Fitzgerald would be interested.

A limousine load of “attaboys” for that Uniondale, N.Y., principal who canceled Kellenberg Memorial High School’s prom. Not unexpectedly, a lot of students and parents disagreed. Very vocally.

Too bad.

Brother Kenneth M. Hoagland, the principal of the Catholic high school in upscale Long Island, said he was fed up with the “flaunting of affluence” as well as “bacchanalian aspects.”

Proms, as any contemporary parent of teenagers knows, aren’t what they used to be. That rite-of-passage, adult dress-up with Dad’s car and prissy chaperones now seems like time-capsule material. Apparently in Uniondale it was not uncommon for students to rent a party house in the Hamptons. It was a given that there would be pre-prom cocktail parties and amply-stocked limos. Parents sometimes chartered boats for late-night “booze cruises.”

The problem obviously is the parents, too many of whom were using their kids’ proms as another forum for and barometer of conspicuous consumption. The right house, the right neighborhood, the right car, the right trophy spouse, the right country club and the right private school.

Realtors, car dealers and country clubs are certainly not going to weigh in.

So schools better, and Brother Hoagland did.

In effect, he said to parents: “Thank you for paying these big tuition bills. But you’ve bought more than a designer diploma for your child, and you’ve purchased more than an excellent college-prep curriculum. Your child is also exposed to a set of values that we trust will prepare them well for what they will encounter in life – including a culture of excess and vanity.

“We just didn’t think that a lot of you parents would be part of the problem.

“We hope you buy in to what we’re doing – because we’re not selling out.”

When it comes to foreign policy, it’s understandable that the U.S. would have contingency plans for just about anything. You can bet, for example, that there are scenarios for a post-Chavez Venezuela, a post-Musharaff Pakistan, a post-Putin Russia and probably a post-Jeb Florida. The Bush Administration would be derelict if it didn’t.

And this, of course, includes Cuba.

But having said that, nowhere else does the U.S. have an appointed “transition coordinator.” Earlier this summer, amid considerable State Department ballyhoo, Caleb McCarry was named to this presumptuous post. His charge is to oversee and facilitate the transition.

Isn’t that Cuba’s responsibility?

It’s now official. Army Pfc. Lynndie England has been sentenced to three years in jail for her sleazy role in the infamous, Iraqi prisoner-abuse scandal of 2003.

But she got off easy. For playing the pervert. For disgracing her country. For jeopardizing lives beyond Abu Ghraib.

Consider that England – out of fealty to a prison-guard boyfriend — further fueled the fury of the insurgency by helping to hand al-Qaeda and the rest of the Muslim world a PR coup that did American credibility untold harm. To this day, Abu Ghraib remains a rallying cry, an anti-American call to arms and an emotionally effective recruiting tool.

In response to prodding by her counsel, England eventually apologized to the detainees and their families, as well as to American soldiers who might have suffered in Iraq for her twisted antics.

But she couldn’t apologize to all the G.I.’s who were impacted by her sadistic actions. Some undoubtedly paid the ultimate price for her appalling behavior.

For that – and the ongoing ripple effects — she got three years. Sleazy off easy.

At the very least she should spend them in Abu Ghraib. Leashes, masks and cameras to be provided.