Understanding Obama via WikiLeaks

cross-posted at Dagblog

The latest Wikileaks document dump, filled mostly with low-grade diplomatic communications, does lay bare one thing that should have been painfully obvious all along: President Obama's Iran strategy.

Here's part of the New York Times write-up:

... the cables ... show how President George W. Bush, hamstrung by the complexities of Iraq and suspicions that he might attack Iran, struggled to put together even modest sanctions.

They also offer new insights into how President Obama, determined to merge his promise of “engagement” with his vow to raise the pressure on the Iranians, assembled a coalition that agreed to impose an array of sanctions considerably harsher than any before attempted.

When Mr. Obama took office, many allies feared that his offers of engagement would make him appear weak to the Iranians. But the cables show how Mr. Obama’s aides quickly countered those worries by rolling out a plan to encircle Iran .... the administration expected its outreach to fail, but believed that it had to make a bona fide attempt in order to build support for tougher measures.

In other words, the Obama Administration has been approaching the Iran problem the way a sane person applying common sense would do: using every available tool, offering friendship for cooperation and punishments for backsliding, and trying to manage the public relations so that Iranian intransigence looks like what it is. In the old days, Republicans called this "speaking softly and carrying a big stick." It's a pretty good approach.

By contrast, the old George W. Bush approach to diplomacy was "shout a lot and break your stick in half to show them how tough you are." This is an optimal strategy for getting beaten up and thrown out of bars. It puts bluster ahead of getting things done, so much so that it undermines the blusterer's power. Note that Bush the Younger couldn't get much happening in the way of sanctions, but Obama could.

If you don't trust the Times reporters, here's an excerpt from a raw document, as a US Treasury official briefs the EU on the new Administration's Iran strategy (April 8, 2009):

To be sure, "engagement" would be an important aspect
of a comprehensive strategy to dissuade Iran from acquiring
nuclear weapons. However, "engagement" alone is unlikely to
succeed. Diplomacy's best chance of success requires all
elements combining pressure and incentives to work
simultaneously, not sequentially.

If that doesn't spell it out for you, here it is: Obama makes gestures of friendship and engagement toward Iran because that is part of the game. Meanwhile, he puts pressure on them from every direction he can in order to force them into accepting his "friendship" on his terms. If you still do not understand how this works, please rent The Godfather. Don Corleone knows how to make friends.

Why does Obama not say, "I am reaching out my hand to Iran as part of a larger strategy to wrestle them into a half nelson?" Because if he admits that the gesture is a pretense, the pretense doesn't work. This, too, should be obvious.

While we're on the topic of the obvious, the document dump reveals Defense Secretary Gates's common sense prediction about how a unilateral attack on Iran's weapons facilities would work:

any strike “would only delay Iranian plans by one to three years, while unifying the Iranian people to be forever embittered against the attacker.”

See how that goes? Short-term win, long-term and permanent fail, with Iran ending up nuclear and hostile for at least a generation. As strategies go ... well, actually that isn't even a strategy. Obama has a plan to squeeze the Iranians to delay and derail their nuclear ambitions, while trying to build bridges to the Iranian people for the future. The American right wants to just attack Iran instead, which won't actually stop their nuclear program but will turn them into implacable nuclear-armed enemies by 2016 or so, in time for a possible Republican President to discover there's nothing left to do about Iran. It's genius.

Now, all of the above should have been obvious to everyone capable of reading a newspaper. But the American right has been dead-set on misunderstanding Obama. Here's a representative selection from September, 2009. The blogger is Scott Johnson of Powerline:

If any sentient person had serious doubt, last week's news that Iran has a covert uranium enrichment facility under construction at a military base outside Qom should serve to clarify Iran's intent to obtain nuclear weapons. News that Obama had been briefed on the existence of this facility during the transition makes it difficult to understand what Obama has said and done about Iran since then. [Emphasis mine] His statements and actions need to be reconsidered in light of the state of his knowledge. In the spirit of inquiry I offer the following premises and tentative theses:

1. In statements going back to the primary campaign, Obama repeatedly referred to Iran's prospective acquisition of nuclear weapons as unacceptable and stated that no option to prevent it should be taken off the table. Yet Obama accepts the legitimacy of Iran's nuclear program and will do nothing to retard it.

2. Obama has known about the second Iranian enrichment facility since the transition.

3. Obama has repeatedly demonstrated an eagerness to avoid confrontation with the Iranian regime -- to the point of fawning over the regime. He prides himself on accepting the legitimacy of the Iranian regime. [Emphasis mine]

4. Obama made nuclear disarmament the theme of his speech before the UN Security Council last week and secured the passage of a related resolution. Although Obama called for "full compliance with Security Council resolutions on Iran and North Korea," he emphasized that the resolution (which named no country) was "not about singling out individual nations."

It goes on for another eight theses, by which point Johnson has persuaded himself that Obama's goal is to pressure Israel into disarming. That's ludicrous, but it is also one of the tamer responses to Obama's Iran policy from the right blogosphere. When Obama claims that a UN resolution manifestly aimed at Iran and North Korea isn't aimed at them, Johnson is dumb enough to take that denial literally. (Luckily, the Iranian and North Korean regimes are not. Those bastards know perfectly well that the President of the United States is not their friend.) Johnson can't even recognize an indirect and understated threat as a threat, let alone understand why such threats might be more effective than loud obvious ones. When Obama speaks softly, Johnson decides that he isn't carrying a stick.

Like all neocons, Johnson prefers what I like to call the Gangster Rap School of Diplomacy: shouting a lot about how tough you are in the most public forum possible, and making threats without worrying about how to back them up. This is what the American right now understands as "toughness." They couldn't be more wrong.

Intellectual Property Blues, Beatles Edition

cross-posted at Dagblog

So, the Beatles are finally available on iTunes, goo goo goo joob. And the news has been greeted with a resounding yawn; many people claim that the move is much, much too late to be hip, and too late to be hip, in the music business, means too late to make a sale. [UPDATE: Since the Beatles sold 2 million songs and 450,000 albums n iTunes this week, I was obviously completely wrong about this.] Anyway, as every music columnist has already pointed out, Beatles fans all ripped all of their CDs to iPods years ago. (Disclaimer: Dr. Cleveland is a Beatles fan with an iPod. He did in fact rip all his Beatles CDs years ago.) But this John-Paul-George-and-Ringo-come-lately move isn't an isolated case: it's part of an ongoing intellectual-property management strategy by the Beatles' people, a strategy that tries to preserve their value by preserving scarcity and keeping prices high. And while that sounds like a reasonable strategy, it's probably going to hurt them in the long run.

For example, The Beatles have never allowed songs in movie soundtracks until this year. Their manager/loyalist/gatekeeper Neil Aspinall, who recently passed away, forbade it. You could pay for cover versions, but the actual tracks were the holy of holies and you couldn't have them. This is why you have never seen a movie set in the 1960s, unless it was Help! or A Hard Day's Night!, in which anyone was listening to the Beatles. Think about it. Think of a movie set between 1964 and, say, 1971 or 1973. What's on the soundtrack? If the characters put on a record or turn on their radio, what do they hear?

Hendrix. Janis. Puff the Magic Dragon. If the movie's budget is too low, Canned Heat. Now, all of that stuff was playing back then. It's "realistic," in the movie sense that those records were actually being played in the time period. And there's plenty of great music from the 1960s that can be licensed cheaply for films. (The Jefferson Airplane's people aren't holding out for top dollar.) So, naturally, film makers put the inexpensive songs on the sound track.

Here's the funny part: if you grew up with films about the 1960s, rather than personal memories of that decade, it probably seems to you as if those less expensive songs, the K-Tel Greatest Hits, were more popular than they were. And it will seem to you as if the Beatles never got played at all. In fact, the Beatles had a kind of carpet-bombing dominance of the airwaves and the record charts for years on end, a kind of dominance that we don't see anymore (and therefore don't intuitively find plausible). In the actual 1960s, the Beatles were ubiquitous. In the film version of the 1960s they're nowhere (man). Our mass media prompts us to imagine a 1960s in which "White Rabbit" was playing constantly and the "Strawberry Fields" never got air time. In fact, it's just the reverse. You hear "White Rabbit" so much now because it was only pretty successful back then.

(Ask a college kid who was more popular in 1968, Hendrix or the Beatles. They will take it as a serious question, and it isn't. Hendrix was a star, but the Beatles were crazy monster supernovas. Jimi's biggest single peaked at #20, which is roughly comparable to how the B-Side to "Paperback Writer" did. Even major figures like Dylan and the Stones, who are in the conversation with the Beatles, didn't have the same kind of success or market power.)

Now, the Apple Records "no soundtrack" policy makes obvious sense as a way to preserve the value of the Beatles brand, by enforcing scarcity. And the new policy will just be a kinder, gentler version of the old one, since the prices to license a Beatles tune for a film will still be sky-high. (One of the three songs licensed this year cost the studio $1.5 million dollars.) But in practice, this strategy has the unexpected effect of undermining younger listeners' sense of the Beatles' importance. The band seems less central, and less important, which means they eventually become less influential and important. This may be hard for some Baby Boomers to understand, because the Beatles' magnitude seems so inescapably obvious to them. But younger listeners weren't there for the Sixties, and the Beatles got left out of the movies.

(The Stones have a different strategy: they license songs for movie soundtracks, but not for soundtrack albums. The songs in the movies keep the band in the public mind, but if you want to buy the record you've got to buy The Stones. It's a smart business strategy; Mick went to the London School of Economics, after all.)

Anyway, here's some free promotion for the Fab Four, because they were pretty good on their off days:

Obama's Veto and Mortgage Fraud

cross-posted at Dagblog

If you've been looking for a fight in the lame-duck session, we may be about to see one: this Wednesday, November 17th, the House is going to have a veto override vote on the so-called "Interstate Recognition of Notaries Act," H.R. 3808. (h/t John Cole) What is the Interstate Recognition of Notaries Act, you say?

A law that would basically make mortgage fraud by interstate banks legal. Let me rephrase that: a law that would make documents notarized out of state immune to challenge no matter how they were notarized, meaning the criminal shenanigans that mortgage servicers have gotten up to, such as swearing under oath to the accuracy of documents they've never seen, would become both legal and practically unassailable. [UPDATE: I was blogging in anger when I wrote this, and became a weaker blogger because of it. The bad documents would not become legally unassailable, but they would become harder to assail. The point of the law is to legalize the banks' slipshod electronic records service, MERS, and the general effect would be "solve" the problem of illegal record keeping by changing the law to the banks' benefit. And that is both immoral and foolish.]

If that's still too complicated, let me put it this way: this law would allow the banks to just make up documents and use them to take your house, even if they couldn't actually find the title to your house (because they'd sold your mortgage, say, or because you don't have a mortgage). And there won't be a damned thing you can do about it. The banks will no longer be accountable to the law. [UPDATE again: This was hyperbole on my part. There are other ways to challenge perjured affidavits, and notarizing perjury doesn't make it immune to challenge. But the general thrust of the law is to make that systematic perjury easier, and raise the bar to challenging it. That's a terrible, terrible idea.]

Now, President Obama vetoed this abomination in October. The shocking part is that it got to his desk at all. It got there on a voice vote in the House and unanimous consent in the Senate, meaning that they didn't actually count the votes.

This bill got through both Houses of Congress without the Democrats having any real idea how it would affect the financial crisis, or what its ramifications were. (To be fair, many of the horror stories about mortgage fraud and routine perjury by mortgage companies had not yet come to light when the bills passed.) Basically, it was the Administration that caught this one in time and killed the bill. That should give you an idea of how carefully our representatives generally think about the oversight of big finance, and of how thorough and terrible the influence of banking lobbyists on the Hill is.

The veto-override vote might only be symbolic; Obama tried to straddle some legal ambiguities on this one, and make his veto immune to challenge, by doing a kind of double veto strategy. He pocket-vetoed it, because pocket vetoes cannot be overridden, but also sent the usual veto memo to Congress, to protect against any claim that Congress was technically in session when he chose not to sign it (if the President doesn't sign a bill while Congress is in session, it automatically becomes law; Obama wanted to guard against that). And now that the Democrats have realized what the law would actually do, I don't think there's going to be a two-thirds majority in favor of it.

Tell your representative to vote against this monstrosity, even so. And keep count of who's willing to be counted as favoring it. If this vote ends up being only symbolic, let's remember what's being symbolized.

FINAL UPDATE: According to D-Day at FDL, this vote is actually an expression of procedural displeasure with Obama over the double-veto-failsafe trick. Sigh. I understand that. But it's hard to cheer for Congress after they originally passed this bill without paying any attention to what it said. Obama's procedural caution happened because he was forced to play backstop for a Congress that hadn't done its job.

International Jewish Conspiracy REVEALED!

cross-posted at Dagblog

This week Glenn Beck dedicated three of his daily TV shows to attacking the philanthropist George Soros. Beck accused Soros, a Holocaust survivor, of collaborating with the Nazis, and further accused Soros (a Jewish international financier) of being a "puppetmaster" who has formed a "shadow government" and is plotting to undermine America, destroy its economy, and subvert its electoral politics. Fox News is fine with this, apparently.

My blogging colleague Michael Wolraich, who is both the author of the newly-released book Blowing Smoke and the blogger known as Genghis, has an excellent piece on CNN.com explaining the history of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that Beck draws on to libel Soros.

Mike's article has brought Dagblog a bunch of brand new commenters, who are very angry on Mr. Beck's behalf and are generously warning us of the dangers of conspiratorial Jews such as Mr. Soros. We thank them for sharing their views. One new internet buddy speculates that Mike must be part of the Jewish conspiracy himself:

Wolraich must be Jewish also and he is trying to defend someone of his own faith right or wrong. When a writer takes one side of a story and never shows even a slightly darker side of the subject you can take his work as biased hersay

That's the best thing about international Jewish conspiracies: they're very very secret, but also clearly visible. This must be convenient.

But I think our new internet friends, and even Glenn Beck himself, are taking their eyes off the real international Jewish conspiracy, started by someone who called himself "Jesus Christ." Or is that his real name?

Joshua of Nazareth, whose agents call him by his Greek alias "Jesus Christos," was a Palestinian Jew with a very serious criminal record, someone routinely denounced by responsible religious leaders. He is on public record threatening the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, which (coincidence?) was subsequently destroyed. "Christos" began with a small conspiracy of 12 followers, each of whom was instructed to go out and make further converts who would go out and make further converts, until today the conspiracy is literally over a billion people. And what were those people pledged to do?

Destroy capitalism. Redistribute wealth. Look down on the hard-working rich, and the rightful Roman authorities, while doing just about everything for criminals, sex workers, and the poor. Does that sound American to you?

Listen to this hate speech: "It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter heaven." Why the persecution of the rich? Why the Jewish liberal class warfare? How long are we going to stand for this?

It's always about giving to the poor, and giving to the poor, and taking from the rich. In Jesus's world, a poor widow who gives two tiny coins to charity is somehow better than a rich person who makes a large, generous donation! And why? Just because he's rich and she's poor! Do the research for yourself; some of his followers (who use assumed names themselves) actually brag about him saying these things, and he's said all kinds of things like it. They leave this kind of propaganda in motel rooms around the nation, hoping to brainwash unsuspecting Americans!

And do you know who Jesus wants to give your hard earned money to? Lepers. That's right. And minorities, like the Samaritans, because for Jesus it's "racist" to love your own group more than the other. He tells all of these little "teaching" stories about Samaritans who are better and kinder and more religious than Jews! That's the kind of hatred we're dealing with.

Maybe it's too late to completely root out this international Jewish conspiracy to foster peace, charity and love. But don't worry. There are plenty of hard-working, true believing Americans all over this country right now, doing their damnedest to stop it. And they've still got a fighting chance.

The Short Lesson of the 2010 Elections

cross-posted at Dagblog

So almost every op-ed page agrees that the lessons of the 2010 midterms are as follows:

1) The Democrats should compromise more with the Republicans, because the Republicans now have about a 50-vote majority in the House.

2) The Republicans should get to decide what counts as "compromise," because the voters are on their side.

3) Obama should apologize to everyone, all the time, for everything he did in his first two years as President. He has been Rebuked by the People and should atone for his Sin of Pride.

That's certainly one way to look at it. Here's another:

The Republicans just made serious gains by not compromising. They turned Not Compromising into 60+ House seats. If last Tuesday night was a shellacking for Democrats, the last election (and truth be told, the one before) can only be described as a shellackety-ackety-acking for the GOP. Even their big angry red wave in 2010 couldn't put the Democrats in a hole as deep as Boehner and Cantor were standing in two years ago, with their sorry 180 seats to Pelosi's 255. Never mind the big Presidential loss they'd taken, and their lopsided weakness in the Senate. But they decided that they had not been Rebuked by the People, no matter what the vote count looked like. They decided they were the True Voice of the People and acted accordingly.

I freely admit that being in opposition and being in the White House require different strategies. But even so, the post-election consensus among opinion journalists flunks the Listening to Themselves Test, badly. The Republicans just followed a political stragegy to major Election-Night gains, and the conventional wisdom is that the Democrats should not follow that strategy.

This advice is either counter-intuitive or just plain stupid. If it comes with a reasonable explanation and an alternative strategy, it's counter-intuitive. If it's just announced as plain common sense, it's plainly stupid.

Democrats should never pay attention to what the Republicans say (or vice versa). The Republicans have absolutely no interest in giving their opponents useful advice. Democrats should pay attention to what their opponents do. That's the lesson. If the other side beats you by playing aggressively and working the refs as hard as they can, you don't counter that by playing less aggressively yourself. Either you figure out a way to make their strategy work against them, or you hit 'em hard and cry foul as loudly as you can. That's what they would do.