Olympian Power

The most astonishing thing about presidential powers in the age of Trump (sorry, Joe!) is how Trump himself exercised them to enrich himself and try to take full control of the mechanism of government.  Trump, of course, is the extreme example of the abuse of power,  and I don't want to compare any of his recent predecessors' behavior to the egregiousness of Trump's.  But it should be remembered that, in recent years, Presidents of the United States have always exercised power in a belligerent, authoritarian way, from Harry Truman finding a way to go to war against North Korea without Congress declaring war on what was essentially a government we did not recognize as legitimate (it was a "police action") to John F. Kennedy extending the trade embargo against Cuba by executive order to Richard Nixon refusing to spend money earmarked by Congress.  But even Jimmy Carter acted belligerently in enforcing the ill-considered boycott of the Moscow Olympics to protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

This is a subject I have discussed before on this blog, but it's worth revisiting now. 

The U.S.S.R. invaded Afghanistan in the last week of December 1979, which the United States viewed as a major crisis despite the fact that the Soviets were essentially intervening in Afghan affairs to swap out one Communist leader for another one.  Two months after Hafizullah Amin, a co-founder of Afghanistan's Communist government, deposed and executed President Noor Taraki, Amin himself was taken out by the Soviets in an effort by the Kremlin to place a government in Kabul under Babrak Karmal that would be more friendly to Moscow.  Coming as it did seven months before the start of the 1980 Moscow Olympics, President Jimmy Carter, who apparently thought that a Soviet-backed Afghan Communist leader like Karmal was a greater threat to peace than a renegade Afghan Communist leader like Amin, called for a boycott of the Summer Olympics.

When I originally wrote about this back in 2004, I more or less said that Carter was able to get the United States Olympic Committee (USOC) to support the boycott even as British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher failed to get the British Olympic Association to do the same.  In fact, as I noted then, apart from Canada and West Germany, no allies supported President Carter's Olympic boycott. 

But I also said that the United States Olympic Committee ultimately agreed to support the boycott because Carter was "acting like the national governess, expecting the USOC to fall in line.. . .. If we Americans weren't such sheep, we would have boycotted the boycott . . .. But no, our Olympic committee voted to blindly support the President."  

But, as Kenny Moore reported in Sports Illustrated in April 1980, it didn't quite play out like that.

The USOC had in fact opposed making their athletes stay home, and the defiance of their British counterparts to Thatcher encouraged them to think they they could stand up to Carter.  But then the White House lowered the boom on the USOC, as they invited sports officials to the State Department for, as Moore reported, "strongly worded briefings which not only presented the Administration case that a boycott was a crucial element in a coordinated U.S. response to a dangerous situation in Afghanistan, but also made it clear that extraordinary measures would be taken to see to it that the USOC had no choice but to comply."   Moore also reported that The Justice Department told the USOC that the President could legally bar athletes from participating in the Games, and Carter vowed that he would in fact take such action if necessary.  The White House even threatened to investigate the tax-exempt status of sports organizations that opposed the boycott, and corporate donors were also under pressure to rescind financial support for the USOC, which relies on private funding, not public monies as Olympic organizations in countries do.  Former Treasury Secretary William Simon, then the treasurer for the United States Olympic Committee, said that the simple fact that the Carter administration pressured these corporate donors "is in itself tragic."  

See, it's always worse than you think.  The United States Olympic Committee was against the boycott before threats, intimidation, and extortion made them decide they were for it.  It was presidential authoritarianism, pure and simple, and it was presidential authoritarianism at its worst.  The Mafia-like pressure brought to bear on the USOC sounds like something Trump would have perpetrated, but this was done by a Baptist Sunday-school teacher.

I posted this look back at this piece of ancient history mainly to how that even the most noble of men, like Jimmy Carter, don't always do noble things.  I also wrote this now because I don't like to speak ill of the dead, and I wanted to get this out while Carter, who turned 99 last week, is still alive.

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And what, pray tell, did the boycott lead to in the end?  Absolutely nothing.  It did not force the Soviets out of Afghanistan in the short term, and the Soviets responded with a boycott of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics.  If anything, it politicized the Olympics and linked international sport to conflict.  William Coghlan, the president of the Irish Amateur Athletic Federation president in 1980, noted, "It must be remembered that Great Britain, now supporting the boycott, herself invaded Afghanistan over the Khyber Pass something like 25 times. She's still in Ireland. Yet civilized people set that aside when we compete."

And a little over twenty years later, the United States invaded Afghanistan after 9/11 to hunt for Osama bin Laden but ended up staying to replace a government we didn't like with one we did (sound familiar?),and like the Soviets did in 1989, left Afghanistan after that didn't work out.  And like the Soviets in the late 1980s, we seem to be headed for a crackup.

And let's hope that other countries don't boycott the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics if Trump is President again.

Biden's Bungles

President Biden's misfortune have turned into an ongoing disaster, which must be making sane Americans fearing a Trump comeback quaking in their boots. 

I mean, he did the right thing in withdrawing from Afghanistan, and the United States is now at peace for the first time since before 9/11.  Except that he didn't consult other members of NATO, the auspices under which we were in Afghanistan in the first place, before going ahead and ending the war.  Even the Germans have complained that Trump consulted with them more than Biden did.

Biden is now pivoting toward eastern Asia to counter the growing threat from China, having signed a deal with the United Kingdom and Australia to sell nuclear submarines, marine craft exclusive only to the U.S. and the U.K., to the Australian navy, to increase security in the Pacific. Except that he forgot to inform France, which had a now-canceled deal to sell diesel-electric submarines to Australia and has overseas territories in the region (can you say "New Caledonia," boys and girls?), and now the French are livid over it.  He has a lot of fence-mending to do when he addresses the United Nations General Assembly today.

Which doesn't give him any time right now to handle the sudden influx of Haitian migrants trying the enter the country from Mexico.

And as if that weren't bad enough, we now learn that a retaliatory strike responding to a terrorist attack in Afghanistan killed innocent civilians.

The poor guy can't get any relief from his allies in Congress as the Democrats attempt - I use that verb loosely - to pass a two-part infrastructure bill.  There aren't enough votes in the Senate to pass a $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill and progressives in the House vow to sink a bipartisan Senate infrastructure deal if the reconciliation package doesn't pass, as they are committed to settling for nothing instead of something when they can't have everything.

And COVID is still a thing, with the vaccine requirements already under threat from state lawsuits before the requirements are even written and with China, which invented COVID, unresponsive to proposed Sino-American efforts to lead the world out of the pandemic. Not to mention the lack of a Sino-American deal to lead the world against climate change.

Biden has the wind at his back.  Unfortunately, it's his own. 

The New Leaders of Afghanistan

Ladies and gentlemen, meet the new Taliban government in Afghanistan!

They're lean.  They're keen.  And they're really mean.

Their new government allows on the the most devout Talib Muslims to serve.  They are all men.  They have terror commandos running their most sensitive ministries.  They tolerate no opposition to their policies.  They abhor pluralism.  They plan to stand for pure Taliban Afghan values.  They plan to put women in their place, which is nowhere in Afghan professional society. .  hey plan to show ethnic minorities who's boss.  They are making it clear that the Afghan people must learn to obey.  And those who resist will be snuffed out.

And the Republican Party is taking notes.  😠

Biden's Nadir?

President Biden gave a forceful and defiant speech defining his withdrawal from Afghanistan and the end of the war, which should have shown Americans that he is not wavering and he will see this and other jobs through.  But when CNN's Jake Tapper suggested that he had a problem with Biden's tone in the speech to national security adviser Jake Sullivan, it became apparent that this explanation of the end of the war in Afghanistan wasn't going to boost his sagging poll numbers.  If anything, it may have sunk them even further.  And while Republicans will continue to attack Biden on the issue, Democrats will do what they always do when forced to defend an unpopular policy from a Democratic administration - duck the question.  Which worked so well in the past.  (NOT!) 

 

Biden has a great opportunity, though, to hit the reset button big time and steer his way out of this low point in his Presidency.  He can now turn full attention to help Louisiana - and, as of today, the Northeast - recover from Hurricane Ida in the middle of a severe COVID outbreak.  Since nation-building didn't work, how about state-building for  a change? Also, there is the infrastructure package, which no one has talked about of late but should return to discussing once Congress returns from recess, which jibes nicely with Biden's "Build Back Better" slogan while we try to build Louisiana back better.  Now is not the time for Democrats to duck questions about Afghanistan - or rely solely on women to vote on abortion now that abortion restrictions in Texas and Mississippi may lead to the repeal of Roe v. Wade - because they counted on that happening in the 2014 midterms and it most certainly did not!   Democrats should back Biden and have his back for his domestic program, which includes continuing to fight COVID, otherwise the 2022 midterms will be the first big step toward a right-wing dictatorship.

And then things will really get bad. 

Afghanistan

I was going to write something about President Biden's withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan eventually, but with the sudden fall of Kabul and the return of the Taliban to power after twenty years, I have to say something right now.

I think it's obvious that the efforts to put a stable government in Afghanistan has shaky from the start, and there wasn't enough done to get said government on a firm footing.  But with the now-deposed Afghan movement so corrupt (a government President Ghani abandoned) and the troops and national police fighting the Taliban for little more than a paycheck to prop up such a corrupt enterprise, the return of the Taliban was inevitable.  Our few successes - killing Osama bin Laden, integrating women in to the power structure- was overshadowed by the attempts to reform Afghan society, stop attacks in the cities, secure the countryside, and neutralize the Taliban in general that were doomed to failure because we only threw money and weapons at the problem and didn't really get to understand the Afghan people.

I don't think it had to be this way.  We might have been able to find a better way to help the Afghans set up a government and trained them without looking too much like foreign occupiers - the very thing the Afghan people are inclined to resist the most - and get out sooner.  Any hope of securing a stable Afghan government was probably dashed when we unnecessarily invaded Iraq - which, ironically, is working out better than Afghanistan.  Relatively speaking, of course.

One thing I agreed with Trump with was taking action to avoid getting into foreign wars like the ones in Iraq and Afghanistan.  In this new age, we have to fight disease and climate change instead of each other, maybe President Biden understands that we can't fight wars like that anymore.  In fact, he made it clear that he didn't want to pass this war on to his successor.

And what happens in Afghanistan going forward is anyone's guess.  But it won't be pretty.

Mutiny and the Bounty

Let me say one thing that have nothing to do with the topic of this blog post before I continue. First of all, I'm okay with tearing down Confederate statues and Columbus statues but not statues of the Founding Fathers, and I'll get to that in greater detail later. But when a report comes out that the Russians were paying the Taliban bounties for American and British soldiers in Afghanistan, Donald Trump's dumb-blonde press secretary emphasizes the statue issue in a press conference?

And when reporters pressed her on this, she all but brushed it off, even though Trump was reportedly briefed on this and denied ever hearing heard of this intelligence.  He even suggested that the intelligence was phony.  How appropriate, coming from a phony President.  And yet seven Republican members of Congress were briefed on it.  The Russians, of course, deny all of this.

Trump is clearly in Vladimir Putin's pocket, and anyone with a pair of eyes can see that.  Russian bounties could have led to additional deaths of U.S. and U.K. troops in Afghanistan. The White House later said that the information they got was not thoroughly vetted and so did not forward it to the Oval Office.  Trump is betraying the country and mutinying against the national security interests of the country, as well as the world.  Now more than ever, we need to get rid of this guy, although I'm afraid that anger over George Washington statues from Boston to Denver (and every town in between) being toppled will help return Trump to office.  

Talibonkers

Donald Trump made a smart decision this past week, but of course any smart decision Trump makes is more by accident than by design, and the accident that prompts it is usually a disaster of his own making.

Trump had allowed American diplomats to negotiate with the Taliban in Afghanistan in an attempt to get U.S. troops out of the country that has ended many an empire (we're next).  The Afghan government objected to Trump's gambit, fearing that it would be shortchanged.  But after the Taliban bombed an American installation, Trump said he was canceling not only talks with the Taliban in Afghanistan but also talks with Taliban leaders at Camp David that were to be secret . . . until Trump let the secret out.

Let me let you in on a secret: Trump gets no points for his smart decision because he should never have made the dumb decision of inviting the Taliban to Camp David in the first place.  Trump probably had delusions of grandeur by achieving the same sort of foreign-policy coup that Bill Clinton (Trump is obsessed with all things Clinton) had when he got PLO leader Yasser Arafat to come to America to negotiate peace with Israeli Prime Minister Yihtzak Rabin.  But the idea of having the guys who gave shelter to Osama bin Laden to plan his attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon - and for all this to come out around 9/11! - is so boneheaded that I needn't say any more.  Except to say that Arafat, once deemed a terrorist, never perpetrated an attack on Americans - indeed, 9/11 sickened him.  On September 11, 2001, when I was stranded in a railway station in Wilmington, Delaware, someone said to me that Arafat was a good man who couldn't control the radical elements under his leadership.  Somehow, I couldn't imagine anyone saying that about the Taliban chieftains.

The only good thing that came out of this is that John Bolton has been fired as national security adviser.  Now there won't be a war with Iran.  Don't expect Trump to answer for his blundering; he'll find another shiny object to distract us. 

Trump and Afghanistan

So what did I think of Trump's explanation of his new policy toward Afghanistan?  Well, I thought he did a good job reading it off the TelePrompter.  The content?  Yeah, that . . ..  He has a plan to increase troop levels to stabilize the country, but he will not set a timeline to avoid giving the Taliban any clue as to when we're getting out.  He himself apparently doesn't have a clue as to what we're going to do . . . expect stay there in a war for all eternity - which could be sooner rather than later thanks to climate change.  I'm not even sure what "winning" in Afghanistan is defined as anymore.

Any chance to have any real success in Afghanistan probably evaporated when Bush pivoted to Iraq for . . . no legitimate reason.

Failure To Launch

Donald Trump is suddenly an internationalist.  He thinks the Chinese aren't so bad after all and the Russians aren't as cool as they seem.  I guess that proves it, the Russians had nothing to do with getting Trump into office - like, they were going to take a chance on promoting an irrational dude who just might turn against them?

It is in this milieu that the Trumpster decided to drop a Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB) bomb on an Islamic State contingent in Afghanistan, which earned him condemnation from . . . the civilized world.  Even anti-Islamic State Afghans were appalled at this move, as it killed only a few dozen terror commandos while causing destruction that went beyond "mass."  It makes me wonder if Trump would use a bazooka to kill a mosquito.

And, as these guys will tell you, there's nothing more dangerous than a wounded mosquito.

If using a megabomb with an acronym that sounds like the name of a town in Utah was meant to scare North Korea into thinking twice about testing a missile that could carry a nuclear warhead, it didn't work.  Kim Jung Un had the missile fired anyway.  

Meanwhile, speaking of misfires, the Democrats - you knew this was coming - ran a Bernie Sanders liberal, James Thompson, in a special election for the U.S House seat in Kansas vacated by Mike Pompeo when he became CIA director, and Thompson lost . . . but he could have won, despite the fact that Kansas has been a solidly Republican state since the the then-Grand Young Party shepherded the state into the Union in 1861.  But the Democratic National Committee, either convinced that Thompson would be blown out of the water (and so it wasn't worth the effort to help him) or so embarrassed that a progressive somehow got the nomination that it didn't want to be associated with him, didn't give Thompson the extra money and support that could have put him over the top.   The Democrats are now planning to blow a similar special U.S. House election in Montana, where another Sanders liberal is running for an open seat as the Democratic nominee, by ignoring him as well.  They seem to be concentrating more on tomorrow's special U.S. House election in Georgia to replace now-Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, where Democratic nominee Jon Ossoff is running in an open primary and could get 50 percent plus one and avoid a June runoff.  If he doesn't win a majority, though, he'll have to face a single Republican candidate in June instead of several, and then it will be even harder for him to get above 50 percent.

Uh, Dems?  You sure you thought out your special-election strategy well?

It looks like this misfire is going to bomb.

War Without End

My friend Nancy was on TV yesterday, but not to appear on a talent show. She was on News 12 New Jersey as one of several protesters demonstrating against the Iraq War, which began eight years ago yesterday. (The demonstration was held in Montclair, N.J., where I spend a lot of time.) Although that war is technically over - all of the American combat troops left in August 2010 - American service personnel are still there to help provide "security" until the end of this year. And to keep you from looking on a bright side that doesn't exist, Americans are still getting killed in Iraq despite their reduced role in the country.

Meanwhile, the U.S. has opened a third front in the Muslim world (after Iraq and Afghanistan), with a series of strikes against Libya. The United States is one of five nations taking part in what is apparently a series of air attacks designed to back up the rebels in Libya and help them get Qaddafi out of power. The main objective is to provide safe passage for civilians and rebels without directly intervening in the conflict. The U.S. is trying to limit its role in this operation as well as its scope, for obvious reasons, and it must be something of a relief for the American commanders that the French and the British are taking the lead this time, but once again, the West is pursuing a war to resolve unresolvable geopolitical headaches in the Middle East, and it doesn't look like there'll be an end to it any time soon.

Speaking of headaches, all this war news is giving me one.

Kaput in Kabul

So what exactly was General Stanley McChrystal thinking when he ridiculed the Obama administration in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine? This couldn't be good for the war effort in Afghanistan, and the irony of McChrystal and Obama on war policy makes these comments all the more ironic. But Obama made it McChrystal clear to the general that he wouldn't tolerate disparaging remarks from any military officer, no matter how high the rank, so reaffirming the President's position as Commander-in-Chief. McChrystal's comments weren't good enough to get him on the cover of the Rolling Stone - like, he's not Lady Gaga, or even Dr. Hook :-D - but the story was good enough to get him canned from his position as commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan.

General David Petraeus, now in charge of the U.S. Central Command, is accepting a demotion to replace McChrystal and assume command of NATO forces in Afghanistan to make Obama's surge work. How's that for patriotism? Too bad he won't succeed. Afghanistan is clearly a mess, with a government of no real authority, and the Taliban are too dug in and and in control of many parts of the country. Besides, the Taliban's chief benefactor, al-Qaeda, has fled to Pakistan and poses more of a threat from there. Most Americans - I, for one, included - don't see any reason to prop up a corrupt, dysfunctional government in Afghanistan, and there are obviously more effective ways of combating terrorism, as our dealings with the Times Square terrorist proved. Petraeus's surge strategies may have worked to a degree in Iraq, which is a more developed and a relatively more stable country than Afghanistan, but not in this case.

Come to think of it, Iraq is still a mess, despite less fighting and a second parliamentary election. Also, a lot of bribery was used to get Iraqis to work together. You'd think the media would pay attention to that, but they're too busy covering more important stuff, like Lady Gaga.

Heck, they'd even prefer to cover Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show.

Media Option

The health care debate is still going on, and rather heatedly, in the Senate where a coalition of Republicans and a handful of moderate Democrats dedicated to the proposition that all men and women are to be shafted equally water down the public option to the point of irrelevance. But unless you watch MSNBC's Ed Schultz, you probably won't get to hear much about it. Even PBS's news program, anchored by Jim Lehrer, devoted the bulk of its broadcast to Afghanistan, a story that has seemingly pushed the health care debate off the news agenda entirely. Some senators would like to see the health care pushed off the legislative agenda in favor of Afghanistan, with Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN) even suggesting that health care be delayed until the Afghanistan issue is settled.

No. Not this time. The last time health care reform was put off, it was put off for fifteen years.

Even worse is that so many people are obsessed with the Tiger Woods story - relax ,I'll get to that - that even if health care reform were given more attention right now, no one would bother keeping up with it. Well, except maybe the millions of uninsured Americans who aren't guaranteed prompt medical attention if they crash their cars into fire hydrants.

Obama's Afghanistan Speech

President Obama gave his long-awaited speech on Afghanistan last night, and he seems confident that he can disable al-Qaeda and the Taliban effectively within the next three years. If polls and pundits are any indication, though, he seems to be the only person who thinks it's possible. Well, maybe Robert Gates as well.

The President announced that he will add 30,000 more troops beginning this month, with escalation to be completed by this coming summer. Other NATO members will be asked to provide more troops. Obama hopes he can begin a withdrawal by July 2011, with a full withdrawal possible by some time in 2012 - January, hopefully. But - I know it's cynical for me to say this - certainly by November 2012.

Specifically, before Tuesday, November 6, 2012.

Obama declared that as long as the Taliban and al-Qaeda are at large, the common security of world is at stake. The President illustrated this by citing numerous terrorist attacks around the world that followed 9/11, and his goal is not to engage in nation-building but to help the Afghan government shore up its foundation and train and prepare an Afghan military to take over the country's security. He plans to do this by launching a counterattack on the al-Qaeda-Taliban insurgency and the securing of key population centers.. as well as helping the government of neighboring Pakistan stabilize itself and support the Pakistani army's objective to secure and stabilize its tribal regions along the border with Afghanistan.

Obama was largely realistic and measured, and his speech was astonishingly low-keyed for that reason. His plan seems to fall short, though, in several areas. For example, without a deeper commitment Afghanistan, he offered no realistic reason to expect Afghanistan to become more secure on its own. Ineffectiveness of the Afghan army remains a concern, as does the weak central government in Kabul, with all the corruption involved with that. Key Democrats have already given their thumbs a downward trajectory in response, and the Republicans - used to hyperactive saber-rattling rhetoric - haven't given Obama much support either.

The President was wise enough to put limits on spending for the counteroffensive, and he expects to see results from Kabul before he gives Afghan President Hamid Karzai more help. Obama even tied the war in Afghanistan to the problems faced at home, sating that America can't afford to and won't stay in Afghanistan for any longer than he plans to. In this otherwise sober speech, Obama insisted that Americans don't historically wish engage in imperialism, occupy other countries, and exploit their resources.

That's what made me laugh, although no one in Latin America or the Philippines were likely laughing at that remark. Well, Obama is a law professor, not a historian.

Having heard Obama's speech - and the references to Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and Cooper Union speech were nice touches - I am begrudgingly willing to give the President the benefit of the doubt on this. I only hope he's right.

Welcome Back, My Friends, To the War That Never Ends

A brief explanation of the five civil wars of Afghanistan:

In December 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan to shore up the Communist government that had taken over the country a year earlier by installing their own chosen Afghan leaders and helping the local Communist Party keep the populace in line. The Mujahideen Islamic rebels took up arms - many supplied by the United States - to defeat the Afghan Communists and the Soviet invaders who supported them, forcing the Red Army out after nearly a decade. Once the war was over, a new one began two minutes later to oust the Communist president, Mohammed Najibullah.

The second civil war lasted three years, from 1989 to 1992 until President Najibullah was overthrown and executed. Two minutes later another civil war started among factions of the Mujahideen for control of the country.

The third civil war found Islamic factions trying to start an interim government and getting a quorum of Mujahideen supporter on one side. This went on for some time until the Taliban formed and gained strength, eventually taking Kabul in 1996 and establishing themselves as the new Afghan government. The third civil war was over.

Two minutes later, anti-Taliban factions and the Northern Alliance started a new civil war to retake Kabul and the countryside. This went on for five years. Meanwhile, Osama bin Laden took up residence in Afghanistan, and, because of the "scandal" involving President Clinton's private sexual affairs, no one paid attention. Except President Clinton himself, who was trying to get bin Laden. No one cared, least of all the next President, George Walker Bush. Then, on September 9, 2001, Ahmad Shah Mas'ud, the one anti-Taliban leader in Afghanistan who could unite much of the country behind him, was assassinated. Two days later the same people who assassinated Mas'ud blew the World Trade Center in New York to kingdom come. The United States entered the fourth civil war in Afghanistan and won a huge victory by helping the anti-Taliban forces take over Kabul. The Taliban fell, and the war was over.

Two minutes later, the Taliban started a counterrevolution, beginning the fifth civil war that has lasted to this very day.

So, we're in Afghanistan to bring a lasting peace and a solid, stable government to a country that has only had eight minutes of peace in thirty years.

And oh yes, when the Soviets invaded in 1979, they had the previous prime minister executed, who had had his own predecessor executed after taking over in a coup.

We boycotted the Moscow Olympics for these people?