The View from Right Field

Fairness in Bailouts – Follow-Up

In my prior post on the "bailout" plan, I said: "The bill is huge. In fact, it is too big (unless it is necessary)." To the extent that I said the bill is too big, I was wrong. I was wrong precisely because it is necessary that the bill be big.

The problem seems to be confidence. A too small bill will leave a doubt as to whether enough resources are being set aside to get the job done. We need a bill big enough to convince people it will work. And that will then increase the chances it will work.

We do not know if the bill will work, but the likely results of either too small of a bill or not doing anything are worse.

Hope In Afghanistan

Numerous reports are saying that we are losing the war in Afghanistan. But the fact we are losing the war, does not mean it is lost. The war in Iraq was being lost, but with a better strategy and more troops, it has been turned around. It is not finally won yet, but it is looking good, and if we persevere, it can be won.

If things couldn be turned around in Iraq, they can be turned around in Afghanistan, too. However, it will be harder in Afghanistan. By the time of the surge and the change in strategy, many Iraqis were sick and tired of Al Qaeda. They saw our new strategy and our commitment. They cooperated and success followed.

I do not know if that is true in Afghanistan. Also, the situation on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border makes this war much more difficult than the one in Iraq. It is going to be tough, both militarily and diplomatically.

So why do I talk about "hope in Afghanistan"? Because I think we have the right people taking over in Afghanistan. Let me quote from a recent report by Michael Yon:

"Of course we need more troops in Afghanistan. But along with an increase in troops, we need a coherent strategy, one that considers the unique circumstances in both Afghanistan and Pakistan and the larger region. We can win every engagement and still lose the war. …

Back in 2003, General David Petraeus realized that the Iraq War was as much about politics and money than anything else. After he took command in early 2007, we saw victory in Iraq. (General Petraeus will not declare victory in Iraq, but I will do it for him.) General Petraeus also realizes that the AfPak [Afghanistan-Pakistan] war will largely be fought in the politosphere. Once General Petraeus has a chance to fully take the reigns at Centcom – which is exactly where America and our allies need him – a wise person will do well to listen closely to what he says.

General Petraeus has ordered a Joint Strategic Assessment Team (JSAT) to evaluate Centcom’s area of responsibility. He did this upon assuming command in Iraq, and that JSAT significantly contributed to the new strategy that proved successful beyond our wildest dreams. Heading the Centcom effort will be Colonel H.R. McMaster, a brilliant officer whose command of 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment in Tal Afar in 2005 was seen as a model for counterinsurgency in Iraq. The JSAT will be an opportunity for General Petraeus to develop a new strategy for AfPak, while not ignoring our responsibilities in Iraq, and elsewhere."

Colonel McMaster was an adviser to General Petraeus on counterinsurgency operations in Iraq. He was recently nominated for promotion to general by an Army review board headed by General Petraeus. He wrote a book, Dereliction of Duty, criticizing US strategy and Army leadership in Vietnam.

People like General Petraeus and Colonel McMaster give me hope that the military side of Afghanistan will be done right. It is then a matter of making sure the diplomatic side is done right – and for that we need the right President.

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Note: I strongly recommend Michael Yon’s website for information on Iraq and Afghanistan. Michael is an independent reporter, relying on contributions from his readers, to support himself in the field. If you can make a contribution, please do so. It is sort of like paying for cable TV but more important.

Credit for What Doesn't Happen

If the Bush/Paulson economic rescue plan works (a big "if" and something we should all hope for), most people will never appreciate how successful it was because they will not understand how bad things could have gotten if it had not succeeded. When success is in the negative, i.e., when it is a matter of something not happening, leaders do not get the credit they deserve because, since the thing didn’t happen, people don’t realize what was avoided and how bad things might have gotten.

If the rescue plan works and a financial panic is avoided, it will be, in a sense, similar to what happened during the first President Bush’s presidency. What didn’t happen then was war across eastern Europe as the Warsaw Pact countries became free and the Soviet Union dissolved. Think about Hungary in ’56, Poland in ‘56 and ‘68 and ’80, and Czechoslovakia in ‘68, and then consider what didn’t happen in eastern Europe in 1989 and 1990. Think about how the map of freedom in eastern Europe changed without war. Germany re-united while staying in NATO. Democracies sprang up throughout eastern Europe. To anybody who grew up and lived in the ‘60s and ‘70s and ‘80s, this was unbelievable. Most people assumed, as Erich Honecker said in January of 1989, that the Berlin Wall would stay for a hundred years. It was gone within months, and the country it had imprisoned was gone with it.

President George H.W. Bush and others made it all seem like it was happening so easily, that most people wound up assuming it was automatic. It wasn’t. It was one of the great accomplishments of the twentieth century, and it is unfortunate that George H.W. Bush does not get the credit he deserves for the role he played in achieving it.

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Note: For a recounting of this story, see A World Transformed by George H.W. Bush and Brent Scowcroft.

Two Comments on the Presidential Debate Last Night

First, in response to a question on the lessons of Iraq, Barack Obama said this: "Now six years ago, I stood up and opposed this war at a time when it was politically risky to do so …." That is not true. It was not politically risky for Senator Obama to oppose the war in Iraq in 2002 when state Senator Obama was running for re-election to the Illinois Senate from the Hyde Park area of Chicago. Given the political leanings of that district, it would have been politically risky to support the invasion of Iraq. Senator Obama’s opposition to the war in Iraq at that time in that district is actually just another example of Senator Obama’s positions fitting the district he is running in at the time.

Second, in response to a question about what parts of his programs he might have to give up because of the economic crisis, Senator Obama talked about things he would cut:

"We right now give $15 billion every year as subsidies to private insurers under the Medicare system. Doesn't work any better through the private insurers. They just skim off $15 billion. That was a give away and part of the reason is because lobbyists are able to shape how Medicare works.

They did it on the Medicaid prescription drug bill …."

The first part of the quotation is the standard Democratic policy that we have to change the part of Medicare that allows private insurers to provide seniors with choices for the medical coverage. Democrats don’t like private involvement in Medicare. It’s against what they believe in; they want the government to run it.

I think the second part probably relates to the new Medicare Part D drug plan that was passed in 2003 even though the transcript says "Medicaid". This is even more troubling because, as I have mentioned before, the really good thing about Part D is that it shows how a government health program can, by involving private companies that give seniors real choices, actually provide a program that people like and that comes in under budget. If Senator Obama does not like this, then that is a worry.

Fairness in Bailouts

As Congress and the country consider the "bailout" plan proposed by President Bush and Treasury Secretary Paulson, there has been a growing cry from Congress and the public about the alleged unfairness of the plan. Why are we helping rich Wall Street executives? What about poor people losing their houses? Some in Congress are trying to take what is already a huge bill and add more things to it. Help people being foreclosed here. Help state and local governments there. After all, if the cost is already $700 billion, what’s few billion more?

But that is wrong.

The bill is huge. In fact, it is too big (unless it is necessary). It would be nice if it could be smaller, but at least it shouldn’t get bigger unnecessarily.*

Instead of the normal kind of budget bill that Congress likes to make into a Christmas tree, with presents on it for everyone (presents paid for with Uncle Sam’s, i.e., the taxpayers’, credit card), we need a telephone pole. We need a bill that does one thing and nothing else. And the one thing it needs to do is to stop a possible financial panic.

We are not trying to help Wall Street investment firms or rich executives or homeowners who can’t pay their mortgages. We are trying to save the economy and prevent a really bad recession. That is the one thing, the only thing, we are trying to do.

If, in the process of rescuing the economy in the best and cheapest way possible, somebody gets helped, that is lucky for them. But that is not the purpose of the bill. The only purpose of the bill is to help all of us by preventing a possible financial panic. The fact some people may get helped in the process does not mean we have to help other people to be "fair".

We can’t afford to help everybody. We are not even sure we can afford what we might have to pay to rescue the economy, so we have to keep our costs as low as possible – to not hurt the economy by unnecessarily wasting money in some futile effort to be "fair" and to keep some money in reserve.

What this situation reminds me of is this quote from Abraham Lincoln:

"My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union. I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause."

And so it is with the Bush/Paulson plan. The goal is to rescue the economy at the least possible cost for all of us together. If the economy can be best saved without bailing out anybody, that is what we should do. If we can best rescue the economy by bailing out everybody, do that. If saving the economy means bailing out some people and not others, so be it.

And that is where we are today. It looks like what we have to do to rescue the economy may result in some people getting bailed out. If that is true, then that is what we need to do – because what we are doing here is rescuing an economy for everybody, not giving bailouts to those who scream about fairness the loudest.

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* While the bailout/rescue plan has a price tag of $700 billion, we really don’t what it is going to cost. Better guesses are in the range of $250 billion (still a lot of money), but apparently that is not the way you "price" this kind of legislation. (See here.)

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Update (9/26/08 11:45 p.m.) A follow-up on the Lincoln quote in this post. The quote comes from a letter President Lincoln wrote to Horace Greeley on August 22, 1862. The letter was in response to an editorial in Greeley’s New York Tribune which demanded Lincoln move forcefully against slavery. By that time, Lincoln was already planning to issue the Emancipation Declaration; he was just waiting, per Seward’s suggestion, for a Union victory to issue it. Lincoln was able to use Greeley’s editorial to do some preparation for the declaration that was coming. Lincoln realized proslavery people would not like freeing any slaves and antislavery people would be upset that not all slaves were being freed. Lincoln was, in effect, explaining his reasoning ahead of announcing his decision. He was emphasizing that the main objective was saving the Union, and he was explaining how he had to fit policy on specific matters to achieve that overall goal.

And so it is with our economic situation. Our goal is to prevent a financial panic. Worries about a possible unfairness in the plan to this group or that, or even within groups, cannot take our focus off the main goal. Once we are comfortable we have achieved the main goal, then we can go back and worry about little unfairnesses here and there.

Yankee Stadium – A Contrarian View

With last Sunday being the last game in Yankee Stadium, there has been all kinds of talk about the history of the place. Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. Joe DiMaggio. Don Larson’s no-hitter. Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris. And more recently, Reggie Jackson, Derek Jeter, Joe Torre and Mariano Rivera.

The only trouble with that story is it is only half true. The Yankee Stadium that hosted its last game on Sunday did see Reggie and Jeter, Torre and Rivera. But those other guys; they never played in the Yankee Stadium that is being torn down after this season.

In 1974-75 the Yankees played their home games in Shea Stadium so Yankee Stadium could be renovated. But it wasn’t just fixed up. Just about everything except the outside walls was torn out, and they basically built a whole new park inside the old walls. They sort of kept the basic shape of the field, but they even changed that some. And the seating areas were totally new.

Which brings me to my one and only visit to Yankee Stadium. It was in August of 1993. But first a little background. From 1991 through 1993 our kids played tee-ball and softball in Oak Park, and each year they had an "Oak Park Youth Baseball Night" at Comiskey Park. And so we went (which shows the kind of things children can make you do). This was the brand new Comiskey Park. The Comiskey Park with an upper deck that went up so high and so steep that you were almost expecting Sir Edmund Hillary to be your ticket taker.

Well, when we walked into Yankee Stadium that day back in August of 1993, my first thought was not Babe Ruth or Mickey Mantle. It was: This is just like Comiskey Park. What’s the big deal? The outside walls may be old, but otherwise it’s Comiskey Park.

And that’s why I think the whole history thing about the Yankee Stadium they are tearing down, as opposed to the one that Ruth and Gehrig and DiMaggio and Mantle played in, is mostly just another case of New York hype.

This Could Be a Bombshell – Part 2

This question of what exactly Barack Obama has told Iraqi leaders, in private, that they should do in their negotiations with the United States is getting a lot of play on the Internet. It will probably never be the "bombshell" I referred to in the title of my prior post on this subject because the Obama fans in the MSM are more interested in reporting on things such as the messages stolen from Sarah Palin’s private e-mail account than considering whether Senator Obama has inappropriately tried to interfere with the conduct of United States foreign policy.

I am not going to go into detail on all of the charges and denials and discussion on this issue. If you are interested, a good website for this is Tom Maguire’s JustOneMinute (see here).

All I wanted to do was to make two or three comments. First, the Obama campaign has denied that Senator Obama told the Iraqis to slow down their approval on U.S. troop withdrawals, but as I mentioned in the "Update" to my earlier post, I never thought he did that.

Second, there are two agreements that the United States is negotiating with the Iraqis. One is the Status of Forces Agreement; this is the one that I mentioned previously. The other is a Strategic Framework Agreement.

There is a bit of a timing crunch on the Status of Forces Agreement because the legal basis governing US troops in Iraq will otherwise end on December 31 when the UN mandate expires. Therefore, it is important to get this done. The Bush administration has said that it does not believe its needs Congressional approval for the Status of Forces Agreement, a position that, not surprisingly, congressional Democrats disagree with. On the other hand, the timing on the Strategic Framework Agreement may not be quite so urgent.

As you can see in the reporting at JustOneMinute, there is a lot of confusion and arguments back and forth as to which agreement Senator Obama was talking to the Iraqis about – and even whether the Iraqis knew which agreement he was referring to. It has been noted that there was also a phone call between Senator Obama and the Iraqi foreign minister in June in which Senator Obama gave the Iraqis advice as to what their policy should be vis-à-vis the United States.

Which brings me to my third point. Even though there may be some legal differences between Senator Obama advising the Iraqis as to what they should be doing in their negotiations with the United States on the Status of Forces Agreement versus the Strategic Framework Agreement, that isn’t relevant. In my mind there is just the question of the propriety of the nominee (or presumptive nominee) of a major political party advising another nation, in private conversations, that it should postpone its negotiations with the US on an important agreement until he becomes President.

Is that proper or not? I am not talking legal; I am talking proper – and the answer is: No.

Actually, it is mind-boggling to me that Senator Obama, or at least one of his advisers, would not understand the inappropriateness of what he did. As I said in my prior post, it is fine for him to say such things on the Senate floor or on the campaign trail, but to do it in private meetings or conversations with foreign leaders is wrong. I do not know if this is a result of hubris or inexperience or just a lack of knowledge about what is proper and what is improper for political candidates to say and do, but it demonstrates a terrible lack of judgment and experience on Senator Obama’s part.

"Never Negotiate Out of Fear – Never Fear to Negotiate"

When it comes to the question of whether the United States should negotiate with other countries, especially unfriendly ones, there are lots of trite little phrases, like the one in the title of this post, that can take the place of real thought. This question has been an issue a couple of times already in this campaign, and it probably will be again.

I think the first time the question came up was at one of the Democratic debates last year (at this point it is hard to distinguish among them). In response to a question to the candidates whether they would, in their first year in office, meet without preconditions with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea, Barack Obama said he would. Senator Obama later clarified his answer by saying that there would have to be an agenda, but he still said there would be no "preconditions". More recently, Senator Obama has amplified his clarification, saying that there would be preparations and preliminary diplomatic contacts to lay a groundwork for meetings, but still no preconditions.

There have been lots of articles and comments on the question of when leaders of countries should meet. In support of his position Senator Obama has mentioned President Reagan’s meetings with Miguel Gorbachev. Others mention President Nixon going to China. Supporters of Senator Obama have scoffed at the idea that meetings should be held out as some kind of a reward to other countries. John Kerry said the "[d]irect negotiations may be the only means short of war that can persuade Iran to forgo its nuclear capability."* He also said "[d]ialogue helps us isolate [Iranian President] Ahmadinejad rather than empowering him to isolate us."

Those on the other side note failed meetings in the past. One meeting they frequently mention is the summit between President Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna in June of 1961. Kennedy apparently sought the meeting to get to know the Soviet leader, but for two days Khrushchev bullied and lectured Kennedy. When it was over, Kennedy himself told one of the reporters covering the meeting that it was "the roughest thing in my life." "He just beat the hell out of me. I’ve got a terrible problem if he thinks I’m inexperienced and have no guts." Some argue that the impression Khrushchev got of Kennedy in that meeting encouraged Khrushchev to approve the building of the Berlin Wall in August 1961 – and maybe even to send nuclear missiles to Cuba the next year.

The purpose of this post, however, is not to go over all of the arguments about when and whether leaders of countries should meet. What I want to do is to mention a risk of such meetings that I have not really seen mentioned, but which can be a real danger in summit-level meetings that are not properly prepared for or which are held even though there is no realistic chance of an agreement being reached.**

The danger of such meetings is this: If a meeting is held, people expect results, either an agreement or at least some kind of statement about how the two leaders will work together in the future. If there isn’t an agreement, the meeting is seen as a failure. And our politicians don’t like to look like failures. After all, you won’t get nice articles in the media and a bump up in the opinion polls if your summit meeting is a failure.

The problem is that the other side knows this, and they use it against us. It takes a strong politician to be willing to come back from a summit without an agreement. President Reagan was willing to do that at Reykjavik, but President Reagan was unusual.

John Kerry claims that "[b]y engaging Iran, we reclaim the moral high ground …. If Iran refuses to budge, we have new leverage to expose it as a threat whose bad intentions cannot be explained away." But it doesn’t work that way.

Democracies and open societies are at a disadvantage in negotiations with dictatorships. If is hard for our politicians to say one thing in public while doing another in private. We have an opposition that will call them on it and a news media that will report it. Dictatorships don’t have that problem. According to Michael Rubin in The Washington Post:

"At a June 14 panel with Iranian journalists and political advisers, former [Iranian President] Khatami spokesman Abdollah Ramezanzadeh explained, ‘We had one overt policy, which was one of negotiation and confidence building, and a covert policy, which was continuation of activities.’ He advised President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to soften his defiance, noting that: ‘During our negotiations and so long as we were not subjected to sanctions, we could import technology. We should have negotiated for so long, and benefited from the atmosphere of negotiations to the extent we could import all the technology needed.’"

So while our President is driven by public opinion and the media to reach an agreement, it is entirely possible the other side will be "agreeing" to things they know they will never do just to string us along.

A good example of how this works can be seen in how Saddam Hussein played world leaders and the media in the run-up to the Gulf War in late 1990 and early 1991. (See A World Transformed by George H.W. Bush and Brent Scowcroft, especially chapters 16-18.)

The result is that we can find ourselves negotiating against not only the other side but also the demands and expectations of public opinion.

What this means is that we shouldn’t have meetings just "to get to know each other" with countries such as Iran and Syria, etc. A president willing to meet such countries without preconditions, without some pre-meeting understanding about what the meeting will accomplish and what the other side will agree to, is setting up himself, and the United States, for either being seen as a failure or accepting a bad agreement – or both.

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* The John Kerry quotes are from an op-ed by Senator Kerry: "The Wisdom In Talking," The Washington Post, May 24, 2008.

** As I indicated above, I am not talking about meetings between friends. Meetings between friendly countries can be held just to talk. What I am talking about here are meetings with countries like those mentioned in the question to Senator Obama.

Update (9/19/08 1:00 a.m): Corrected a typogrpahical error in the quotation from Michael Rubin.:

Truth in Politics. Don't We Wish.

The mainstream media is apparently getting upset at what they say are lies in John McCain’s ads and campaign statements. For example, see Steve Chapman’s column in Sunday’s Chicago Tribune here. Also, see Howard Kurtz in The Washington Post here,

I agree with Mr. Chapman that the McCain campaign was over the top when it claimed that Barack Obama was comparing Sarah Palin to a pig when Senator Obama used the lipstick-on-a-pig metaphor to say a McCain administration would be no different than the George W. Bush administration. However, where was the outrage, other than from Republicans, when the Democratic co-chairman from South Carolina said Sarah Palin’s only qualification for Vice President was that she had not had an abortion?

I also would not have put out a commercial that said Senator Obama supported a bill requiring sex education for kindergartners when what the bill apparently provided for was age-relevant lessons for each grade. Senator Obama would not favor kindergartners learning about sex before they learned to read, as the commercial said, but unfortunately, there are people out there who would favor something pretty close to that.  [See Update below.]

I would rather that Senator McCain and Governor Palin not say that Senator Obama was going to raise taxes because I don’t think that is accurate, at least right away. What I would say is the Democrats, including Senator Obama, want to spend so much money that they are going to have to raise taxes on somebody or something – and it’s not going to just be the rich because they don’t have enough money. Ultimately, all Americans are going to have to pay for that increase, either through higher tax bills for themselves or higher prices on what they buy or lower economic growth for the economy as a whole.

But in spite of what Mr. Chapman and many others like to say, Governor Palin did stop the bridge to nowhere. Sure, Congress sent the money that had been originally set aside for the infamous bridge to Alaska for them to use as they wanted. But Governor Palin was the one who decided Alaska would not build the bridge. She stopped it. If you think this isn’t right, ask Senator Ted Stevens and Representative Don Young. They were pretty mad when she decided to kill the bridge without asking them. I suppose you could argue that what Governor Palin has been saying is an exaggeration or a little puffing, but calling an exaggeration a lie doesn’t help restore truth to politics.  [See Update below.]

Also, before we complain too much about what the McCain campaign is doing, how about remembering Senator Obama saying, back in February: "We are bogged down in a war that John McCain now suggests might go on for another 100 years." That wasn’t what Senator McCain said. Senator McCain said he would not object to troops staying in Iraq for a long time, like in Germany (where we have been for 63 years), as long as they weren’t getting killed or wounded. But that didn’t stop Senator Obama from saying what he said and repeating it.

But most of all, how about the biggest lie of all: That President Bush deliberately lied about there being weapons on mass destruction in Iraq. No, he didn’t.. The CIA told him there were WMD there. The intelligence agencies of our allies thought there were WMD in Iraq. Some of Saddam Hussein’s own generals even thought Iraq had WMD.* Sure, looking back on it now, you can find a stray comment here or a minority view there that raised a question about whether Iraq had WMD. But the conclusion of the people President Bush had to rely on was that Saddam Hussein had WMD. The fact they were wrong doesn’t mean he lied.

But because the "Bush Lied" claim fits the disdain that a lot of the MSM has for President Bush and because it helps Democrats incite their left wing crazies, a lot of Democratic politicians and large parts of the MSM keep saying that President Bush lied us into war.

I wish truth and accuracy mattered more in politics, but they don’t. Partisans on both sides are at times so blinded by their dislike or even hatred for the other side. that truth loses out. (See, for example, Howard Dean saying that Republicans are evil.) When the whole "Bush lied" charge is made and remade and passes for truth for many Democratic politicians and in large parts of the MSM, I find their outrage over a campaign ad here or some political charge there to be a little hard to take seriously.

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* On this point in particular, see, among others, John Hughes, "Bush had good reason to believe there were WMD in Iraq," Chrisitan Science Monitor, April 12, 2006.

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Update (9/17/08 8:10 am):  Following up on the sex education commercial, see this article by Byron York at NationalReview.com.  All things considered, it probably would have been better if the McCain campaign had not run this commercial.  They should have known not to re-use a charge made by Alan Keyes.

 

On the “bridge to nowhere” point, see this article from the Anchorage Daily News of February 8, 2008, and this one from March 12, 2008.  In fact, after re-reading these articles, I don’t think either Senator McCain or Governor Palin have been exaggerating on this point.  Governor Palin did stop “the bridge to nowhere” once she had a chance to, once she became governor.  Senators Obama and Biden could have voted against the bridge when they had a chance, but they didn’t.  They just went along.  Sarah Palin challenged the system - and won. 

This Could Be a Bombshell

According to Amir Taheri in today’s New York Post, while Barack Obama was in Iraq this past summer, Senator Obama told Iraqi leaders, in private, that they should put off negotiations with the United States on a status of forces agreement for U.S. troops in Iraq until after the new president took office. Specifically, Amir Taheri said:

"According to Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, Obama made his demand for delay a key theme of his discussions with Iraqi leaders in Baghdad in July.

‘He asked why we were not prepared to delay an agreement until after the US elections and the formation of a new administration in Washington,’ Zebari said in an interview.

Obama insisted that Congress should be involved in negotiations on the status of US troops - and that it was in the interests of both sides not to have an agreement negotiated by the Bush administration in its ‘state of weakness and political confusion.’"

As Ed Morrissey notes here, Amir Taheri does not have a great track record for accuracy, so this report may not be correct. On the other hand, as Morrissory notes, Taheri does name his source, which gives his report some credence.

If the report is wrong, then Senator Obama is owed an apology.  [See Further Update below.]

If the report is right, then Senator Obama has made a big mistake. A candidate for president does not go around telling foreign countries to put off their agreements with the United States until after he gets elected. It is inappropriate, wrong, and possibly a violation of the Logan Act.*

If this report is true, I don’t know what Senator Obama was trying to do. But instead of guessing, we should wait to see what comes of this matter. Let’s hope the MSM cares as much about this question, which actually relates to what a president does, as it seemed to care about Governor Palin’s views on creationism.

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* The Logan Act which prohibits US citizens from trying to directly or indirectly influence the conduct of a foreign government in relation to its disputes or controversies with the United States. See here.

Historical footnote: In late October 1968, just days before the election, Lyndon Johnson announced that an agreement had been reached with the North Vietnamese for a bombing halt and on a format for future negotiations. After General Nguyen van Thieu initially agreed to the proposal, the South Vietnamese government withdrew its agreement on the Friday before the election. Liberal historians have accused Richard Nixon of having encouraged Anna Can Chennault, widow of General Claire Chennault, to get the South Vietnamese to sabotage the agreement. Theodore White, in The Making of the President 1968, debunks the charge. (See pages 378-381.)

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Update (9/16/08 1:30 a.m.): The headline and the first paragraph of Taheri’s article seem to say that Senator Obama was seeking a delay in a possible withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. However, I am not sure that is what Foreign Minister Zebari was talking about, at least from what I read in the quote in the article. The Foreign Minister seems to be talking about the status of forces agreement that the United States and Iraq were negotiating at the time. The purpose of the status of forces agreement is to provide a legal basis for U.S. troops to remain in Iraq after December 31, when the United Nations mandate expires. The Democrats were making a big deal about the status of forces agreement last summer. They didn’t like the terms or even the fact the Bush administration was negotiating the agreement since Bush will be leaving office in January. While interfering with the US’s negotiations with Iraq on the status of forces agreement is not as "sexy" of an issue as trying to interfere with possible troop withdrawals, the point is the same: It is absolutely improper for a presidential candidate to go around trying to interfere with on-going negotiations between the United States and another country.

Further Update (9/16/08 12:20 pm): Apparently, no apology is owed to Senator Obama on the charge that he tried to interfere with the United States’ negotiations with Iraq on a status of forces agreement when he visited Iraq in July. According to this report, while the Obama campaign denied that Senator Obama had secretly urged the Iraqis to postpone a deal on withdrawal of US forces from Iraq until after the election, it admitted that Senator Obama did try to interfere with the United States’ negotiations with Iraq on a status of forces agreement.

Obama’s national security spokeswoman said Senator Obama told the Iraqis that they should not rush through the status of forces agreement until after President Bush leaves office. I realize that Senator Obama feels that Congress needs to review this agreement (the Bush Administration disagrees). If that is his position, he is free to say it on the Senate floor or on the campaign trail. However, he should not be going to Iraq and secretly telling the Iraqi government that it should delay negotiations with the United States on this agreement until after he is elected president. That is absolutely and completely improper.