So, what actually happened? First, did Obama flub the oath, if so, did Roberts flub it as well? Lets have a look at the transcript:

ROBERTS: I, Barack Hussein Obama…
OBAMA: I, Barack…
ROBERTS: … do solemnly swear…
OBAMA: I, Barack Hussein Obama, do solemnly swear…
ROBERTS: … that I will execute the office of president to the United States faithfully…
OBAMA: … that I will execute…
ROBERTS: … faithfully the office of president of the United States…
OBAMA: … the office of president of the United States faithfully…
ROBERTS: … and will to the best of my ability…
OBAMA: … and will to the best of my ability…
ROBERTS: … preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.
OBAMA: … preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.
ROBERTS: So help you God?
OBAMA: So help me God.
ROBERTS: Congratulations, Mr. President.

The transcript makes clear that Justice Roberts made a mistake first, then corrected it, after which President Obama repeated the mistake not the correct version. In other words, both flubbed the oath, Roberts corrected himself, Obama did not.

More important than the flub, though, is that the message stays the same; the meaning of the sentence does not change. Shorter; there’s no use in debating the issue since it doesn’t matter whether Obama flubbed it and if so why.

©2009 PoliGazette. All Rights Reserved.

“Madame Clinton is a good friend of Afghanistan, a close friend of ours,” Foreign Minister Rangin Dadfar Spanta said. “But if somebody believes that our government, the government of President (Hamid) Karzai is involved as a government entity in the production of drugs, this is absolutely wrong.”

Clinton also descibed the Afghan government as highly “corrupt,” which did not charm her Afghan counterpart either.

The real problem, Spanta told the Associated Press, is that the Afghan government is not in control of Helmand province. This province is one of the most violent of the country. The Taliban are still strong in Helmand where they encourage farmers to produce opium. Part of the opium money is used by the Taliban to buy weapons and influence.

“The main production center of drugs is Helmand, and we are not in charge. Helmand (is) not under control of my government,” Spanta said. “If the international community is serious about fighting drug production and drug trafficking, they have to bring Helmand under our control.”

He added that Kabul only controls the province’s capital and some “islands” of territory around the rest of the region.

There are two sides to Clinton’s remarks; firstly, Afghanistan is a narco-state because the far majority of the world’s opium is produced in this war-torn country. Secondly, the other side of the story is that the Afghan government is no promoting opium production. It has in the past been willing to destroy opium farms but it simply lacks the strength and means to a sizeable part of the country’s opium farms.

Clinton and Spanta should both also keep in mind that opium is the only product farmers in Afghanistan can grow and make a profit. The country is nearly unfriendly to human life. Farmers are not growing poppy because they want to but because they have no alternative.

Rather than destroying these farms and taking their livelihood away from Afghan farmers, Kabul and Washington have to use Afghanistan’s opium for medical purposes. World opium and medicine organizations and businesses have long complained that they cannot get their hands on enough opium for medicinal purposes. Using Afghanistan’s opium for these purposes would help the world and Afghanistan itself.

Lastly, although Afghanistan is the world’s number one opium producing country, Clinton should express herself more carefully. She is no longer campaigning; she will be America’s secretary of state, which means that she will have to improve the country’s relationship with enemies and friends. Insulting them is not helpful.

©2009 PoliGazette. All Rights Reserved.

“I think you look at each item and see what is a violation of the law and do we even have a right to ignore it,” she told Fox’s Chris Wallace. “And other things that are maybe time that is spent better looking to the future rather than to the past.”

Pelosi’s remarks come shortly after Rep. John Conyers, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said he wants to look into whether the Bush administration broke the law by taking the nation to war against Iraq and instituting aggressive anti-terror initiatives.

Conyers called for an “independent criminal probe into whether any laws were broken in connection with these activities.”

President-Elect Barack Obama told ABC News a week ago that he believes that Washington should look towards the future rather than the past. “I don’t believe that anybody is above the law,” he told ABC News a week ago. “On the other hand, I also have a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.”

Pelosi explained that Obama and Conyers are not “that far apart. There are different subjects and you treat them differently.

“We cannot let the politicizing of, for example, the Justice Department to go unreviewed,” she added. “I want to see the truth come forth.”

Although it was an unpopular decision, President Gerald Ford was right not to press charges against President Richard Nixon. Prosecution would have damaged the American people’s faith in government and it would undoubtedly have torn the country apart. Prosecuting top Bush adminstration officials will have the same effect. If Pelosi and Obama are serious about bringing the country together they have to let byones be bygones and focus on the future.

Pelosi and Obama are not the same kind of politician, however. Where Obama ran as a moderate last year, Pelosi is known as an ideoligical liberal partisan hack who detests compromise. If one Democrat is indeed likely to prosecute Bush officials just to get even it is her.

Moderates and conservatives can only hope that Obama will have tremendous influence over the speaker, and that he will curb her desire for revenge.

©2009 PoliGazette. All Rights Reserved.

Although the goal of campaign financing laws can count on general support, the laws themselves cannot. Especially conservatives complain that these laws are in breach with the first amendment guaranteeing the freedom of speech.

Ironically, liberals supported the campaign finance reforms Obama and his top donors circumvented successfully last year. Liberals argued for years that Big Money had too much influence. They favored laws that would limit the amount an individual could give to one candidate.

Not only did these donors circumvent campaign finance laws, the WaPo adds that Team Obama new about it and actively used these donors to receive more. He turned to these top-donors ‘repeatedly [...] in financing his campaign, transition and inauguration,’ the article says.

Approximately 100 families and individuals are involved. They donated at least $100,000 each to Obama’s campaign and separate committees ‘independently’ working for an Obama victory. ‘The families gave to as many as five committees, records show, and 27 of the 94 families also bundled money from others, collecting millions of dollars on top of their personal donations.’

‘Among the supporters were well-known families such as the Rockefellers, as well as lesser-known backers such as New Yorker Frank Brosens, a leader in the hedge fund industry, who raised $500,000 for Obama’s campaign and inauguration in addition to the $182,000 he gave with his wife, parents and three sons.’

Although there is certainly nothing wrong with donating to a cause one believes in, the records show that campaign financing laws are ineffective. Clever and savvy rich individuals are able to circumvent the law and can give hundreds of thousands of dollars nonetheless; directly and indirectly.

Campaign finance laws have been disastrous. They add little to nothing; yet, they infringe on individuals’ right to the freedom of speech. The article shows that abolishing these laws is the best way forward; that way, the playing field will be leveled once again and it will simplify oversight of campaigns.

©2009 PoliGazette. All Rights Reserved.

It works as follows: Iranian agents (or businessmen) contact friends or allies in foreign countries. These friends / allies use a company in their country as a front to buy technology from the U.S. When they receive the products, they send it to their Iranian buddies who then use them in bombs and other weapons.

The above is an admitted simplification of quite a complex scheme:

While illegal trafficking in weapons technology has occurred for decades — most notably in the case of the nuclear smuggling ring operated by Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan — the new documents suggest that recent trading is nearly all Internet-based and increasingly sophisticated.

Many of the schemes unknowingly involve U.S. companies that typically have no clue where their products are actually going, the records show.

“The schemes are so elaborate, even the most scrupulous companies can be deceived,” said David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) and co-author of a forthcoming study of black markets for weapons components.

Albright said the deceptions can be even more elaborate when the target is nuclear technology. “That’s where the stakes are the highest,” he said. “If Iran is successful, it ends up not with an IED but with a nuclear weapon.”

Rare details about the illicit markets emerge in court records from the Justice Department’s investigation of Iran’s Dubai network, as well as in the ISIS study, which tracks four years of secret trading by Iranian and Pakistani front groups. The study includes copies of invoices and the contents of e-mails from companies looking to buy Western technology.

The good news is that the U.S. knows that Iran is doing this, and mostly how. The bad news is that this does not make it much easier to prevent Iran from purchasing goods it is not allowed to purchase.

It should be rather obvious that a lot of resources and manpower should be allocated to those intelligence officials and departments who deal with this problem. These weapons are used by terrorists in Iraq; American technology is killing American soldiers.

This too will be a major challenge for an Obama administration, albeit perhaps one he does not have a whole lot of direct influence on himself.

©2009 PoliGazette. All Rights Reserved.

One of the main reasons for the stark assessment is that Obama wants to invest heavily in the U.S. economy during his years in office. The most sober plans anticipate $700 billion in extra investments while many believe the investments will end up in the trillions of dollars. 

Although preparing the American people for major investments and deficits, Obama emphasizes that he plans to spend responsibly. “When the American people spoke last November, they were demanding change — change in policies that helped deliver the worst economic crisis that we’ve see since the Great Depression,” Mr. Obama told reporters at his transition offices. He added, “They were demanding that we restore a sense of responsibility and prudence to how we run our government.”

Many believe government spending to be necessary in the coming years to help the U.S. economy recover. Experts charge that the problems with the economy are structural. This means that the economy will need drastic and structural changes if America wants to be able to compete with Asia in the coming years and decades. “Changes” often cost money.

Republicans and fiscally conservative Democrats are nonetheless worried that Obama’s grand plans mean that government spending will run completely out of hand. They argue that the plans will result in an even less healthy spend-receive balance than at present (which is quite terrible). 

Spending may be considered necessary, but unwise spending is just that: unwise. If history is any guide, and it usually is, major deficits will end up weakening the U.S. economy in the long run rather than improving it. The U.S. economy is in trouble today precisely because it was kept artificially high. Pumping more money in the system in order to once again create a bubble and artificial growth will cause tremendous blowback - if one thinks the situation is bad now, one should look at what one’s children will face if Obama’s plans are put into action.

In the end, the only way for the American economy to truly recover is by letting it go down slowly, after which it will rebuild itself in an improved version. The goal should be to create an American economy 2.0, not a remake of 1.0.

©2009 PoliGazette. All Rights Reserved.

One of its main tools in order to strengthen the more moderate wing of the GOP is a forum. PoliGazette and CP may join forces later on with regards to this forum; it has a very real potential to be the forum for the kind of Republicans described above. I encourage you all to head on over to this forum, to read some threads, start some of your own, and to start debating with each other. The debate options at a blog are always fairly limited since you can only talk about whatever the blogger posts. Not so with a forum; there you can take the initiative.

Some threads are already in place for those who love to debate: one about the RNC chair, another one about Bush giving medials to America’s main allies in the war against Iraq, and so on. Go there, start debating.

©2009 PoliGazette. All Rights Reserved.

Several months after the initial bailout, these fears seem to become reality; increasingly more sectors are demanding financial support. U.S. automakers requested it in December 2008, quite irrationally arguing that they too were vital to the U.S. economy. If the would fall, they argued, millions of Americans would lose their job and, therefore, their income. Now, in January 2009, the situation has become even more irrational, even entertaining: the porn industry has joined the ranks of bailout partitioners.

Hustler publisher Larry Flynt and Girls Gone Wild CEO Joe Francis said Wednesday they will request $5 billion in aid. “The take here is that everyone and their mother want to be bailed out from the banks to the big three,” said Owen Moogan, spokesman for Larry Flynt. “The porn industry has been hurt by the downturn like everyone else and they are going to ask for the $5 billion. Is it the most serious thing in the world? Is it going to make the lives of Americans better if it happens? It is not for them to determine.”

Francis said in a statement that “the US government should actively support the adult industry’s survival and growth, just as it feels the need to support any other industry cherished by the American people.” He added to CNN: “We should be delivering [the request] by the end of today to our congressmen and [Secretary of the Treasury Henry] Paulson asking for this $5 billion dollar bailout.”

Flynt himself also spoke out about the matter. He admitted that the porn industry is not dying, as such; DVD sales are going down, but Internet revenue is going up. Flynt nonetheless believes that his industry could use a bailout, saying: “This is very unhealthy as a nation. Americans can do without cars and such but they cannot do without sex. With all this economic misery and people losing all that money, sex is the farthest thing from their mind. It’s time for congress to rejuvenate the sexual appetite of America. The only way they can do this is by supporting the adult industry and doing it quickly.”

One wonders whether Flynt et alia are playing a game here, or whether they are serious. If the latter, the answer can be very short: bailout out the porn industry will be deemed immoral by the majority of Americans and it would make no sense economically, since the economic impact of the porn industry is limited. If nothing else, their request proves that the bailout rage is becoming increasingly ridiculous, leading “everyone and their grandmother” to ask the government to bail them out. No government should help all companies, businesses and individuals in trouble: capitalism and free markets mean that some businesses will go broke, they have to, in order to improve the economy as a whole.

Reading Flynt’s remarks, however, gives me the impression that he is, as Hot Air puts it rather well, “using satire to make a political point about the sudden necessity of private enterprise to receive public subsidies.” His goal seems to be to show the U.S. government and the American public that the bailout rage is running out of hand and that who are and who are not bailed out is increasingly decided based on subjectivity. 

If so, his publicity stunt can only be welcomed; it puts the entire bailout rage into perspective and it may even cause proponents of all kinds of bailouts to see that, perhaps, just perhaps, bailout out everyone isn’t the cure for the U.S. economy’s disease.

©2009 PoliGazette. All Rights Reserved.

That does not mean, of course, that I endorse Friedman’s views wholly. One of my caveats with him is, for instance, that he did not truly seem to understand what conservatism is. He described modern day liberals as ‘conservatives’ because they want to keep the system as it is: with a big, intrusive government actively ‘helping’ people.

Friedman came to the above conclusion by arguing that conservatism is about ‘conservatism the present state society is in.’ Although that is correct to a degree, it misses the larger point that conservatism teaches that human nature and the universe itself are governed by certain rules, which we can discover by studying the past. Conservatism teaches that breaking with these rules will prove destructive.

This means that conservatives can very well argue that, if these rules have been ignored for the last 50 years, change has to come. This change is not radical change, however, in so far that it is nothing more than practicing the rules mankind has always been governed by and that our forefathers adhered to, consciously or subconsciously.

©2008 PoliGazette. All Rights Reserved.

The report, which is more an opinion piece than anything else, points out that Obamites blasted Clinton only a few months ago.

“What exactly is this foreign policy experience?” Obama said mockingly of the New York senator. “Was she negotiating treaties? Was she handling crises? The answer is no.”

Greg Craig, selected to serve as White House counsel in the Obama administration, also attacked Clinton earlier this year saying: “She did not sit in on any National Security Council meetings when she was first lady.”

And he wrote in a memo: “There is no reason to believe … that she was a key player in foreign policy at any time during the Clinton administration.”

Susan Rice, a top Obama adviser likely to land a spot in his administration, made fun of Clinton back in March. “There is no crisis to be dealt with or managed when you are first lady,” Rice sniffed last March. “You don’t get that kind of experience by being married to a commander in chief.”

All that has changed considerably in recent weeks.

Obama adviser William Daley over the weekend said, for instance, that Clinton would be “a tremendous addition to this administration. Tremendous.”

Senior adviser David Axelrod called Clinton a “demonstrably able, tough, brilliant person.”

So, what happened?

Well, what happened is simple: they were campaigning back in the early spring and late winter. During campaigns hyperbole is used quite frequently. As David Gergen, who has served as an adviser to both Republican and Democratic presidents said: “That was then; this is now. Campaigns are thus.”

“Generally speaking,” Gergen said, “there is a recognition that campaigns bring a certain amount of hyperbole, and when it’s over you try to find the most talented people you can find to work with you.”

And that is what happened between Obama and Clinton: months ago, Obama had to ridicule Clinton just as she had to ridicule him. The goal was to win the presidential nomination of their party, not a role in the administration of a rival. During campaigns you will have to spin everything in as negative a manner as possible for your opponent.

It’s not personal. It’s politics.

Now that the campaign has ended and Barack Obama has become the president-elect, there is no need to continue ridiculing each other. Now, both sides are only interested in furthering their own career and, of course, improving the Democratic administration which will be in power for at least four, possibly even eight years.

©2008 PoliGazette. All Rights Reserved.

Krugman argues that the New Deal created jobs, improved the country’s economy, and pulled it out a terrible depression.

Writing for the Wall Street JournalAmity Shlaes explains that Krugman’s reasoning isn’t sound.

Looking at the statistics from the 1930s and early 1940 it becomes clear, Shlaes writes, that the New Deal’s spending did not improve the economy. Rather, the extra spending meant that taxes had to go up which hurt businesses, their ability to compete and their willingness to hire workers.

Additionally, the New Deal gave much more power to unions who then demanded massive wage increases even though businesses could ill afford them.

Statistics show, Shlaes writes, that ‘one man in four was unemployed when Roosevelt took office. They show joblessness overall always above the 14% line from 1931 to 1940. Six years into the New Deal and its programs to create jobs or help organized labor, two in 10 men were unemployed.’

Other stats, noted by one Lee Ohanian, show that ‘even late in 1939, total hours worked by the adult population was down by a fifth from the 1929 level.’

‘To be sure,’ Shlaes goes on to write about statistics cited by Krugman and others, ‘Michael Darby of UCLA has argued that make-work jobs should be counted. Even so, his chart shows that from 1931 to 1940, New Deal joblessness ranges as high as 16% (1934) but never gets below 9%. Nine percent or above is hardly a jobless target to which the Obama administration would aspire.’

The reason for the above is that ‘the notion that government could engineer economic recovery by favoring the public sector at the expense of the private sector’ was proved false. ‘New Dealers raised taxes again and again to fund spending. The New Dealers also insisted on higher wages when businesses could ill afford them. Roosevelt, for example, signed into law first his National Recovery Administration, whose codes forced businesses to pay an above-market minimum wage, and then the Wagner Act, which gave union workers more power.’

‘As a result of such policy, pay for workers in the later 1930s was well above trend. Mr. Ohanian’s research documents this. High wages hurt corporate profits and therefore hiring. The unemployed stayed unemployed. “If you had a job you were all right” — the phrase we all heard as children about the Depression — really does capture the period.’

Although the New Deal undoubtedly helped some - it created jobs for many unemployed, who would not have been able to take care of their families without the emergency job; it created programs to help and assist the poor - it was far from a perfect policy. One could even go so far as to argue that the New Deal’s approach hurt the economy’s ability to recover; economists could very well argue, and they do, that the country’s economy would have recovered faster if Roosevelt would have implemented less far reaching and costly programs.

Of course the real debate is less about how to revive the economy and more about politics in general terms: people like Krugman want the government to become more powerful, bigger, and directly involved in improving society, helping low income households and closing the gap between the rich and the poor as much as possible. Grand New Deal plans are meant to reshape society, not (merely) to help the economy recover; most research clearly shows that a more fiscally conservative approach is in the nation’s long term interest.

President-elect Barack Obama has moved to the center with regards to foreign policy in recent weeks, but he seems less inclined to do the same on most important domestic issues. How he deals with the economy, and whether or not he will advocate a new New Deal, will be a sure sign of things to come domestically in the next four years. It could very well be that his foreign policy will be realist, even hawkish realist, but that (some of) his domestic policies will be very liberal indeed.

©2008 PoliGazette. All Rights Reserved.

For instance, 24.4% Republican voters want Governor Sarah Palin to be the Republican candidate for president in 2012. Only 13.4% of all voters agree. 

At the same time, Governor Mitt Romney ranks second among all voters, six points behind Palin, but leads among all voters (be it barely).

Among conservatives, both represent an entirely different faction: Palin is the Christian conservative while Romney is the darling of (elite and well educated) fiscal conservatives. These two battled it out earlier this year with fiscal conservatives favoring Romney, Christian conservatives supporting Governor Mike Huckabee, and the party ending up with Senator John McCain as the compromise candidate.

A compromise figure not able to make life truly difficult for now president-elect Barack Obama.

Most remarkable about the figures, however, is that there is a third candidate who does relatively better (meaning: smaller gap) among all voters than among Republicans: Governor Bobby Jindal. Jindal has quite a low profile nationally, yet he already ranks third in both categories. When all voters are included, the gap between him and Romney is only 1.2%, which is remarkable. 

Huckabee fares less well; he is fourth with only 9.7% among Republicans and 8.0% among all voters.

This while Huckabee was the favorite of the Christian conservative base.

So what happened to Huckabee? Palin. Although Huckabee could count on the support of Christian conservatives during the primaries, they all flocked to Palin during the general election campaign. Palin became their candidate, their darling even. The defeat made her more not less popular among this group of conservative voters for they consider her a martyr. 

The above means that the Republican Party could very well nominate a person who is deemed anti-intellectual, simple, naive and overly socially conservative in 2012 or that the war between the fiscal conservative and social conservative base will continue with at least one side staying home on election day, thereby ensuring Obama a second term.

That is, unless Palin can improve her image, studies hard and convince libertarian and fiscal conservatives that she is more than just a socon (unlikely). Or if Romney will succeed in courting Evangelicals and convincing them that either his Mormon faith should not be a problem to them (unlikely) or that his faith and their faith teach the same basic principles and values (less unlikely, but not altogether likely). 

Of course there is a third option, an option I consider most likely and, especially, most in the interest of the Republican Party: that conservative voters will agree on a compromise candidate who endorses conservative views in most ways. In other words, a person who is a convinced social conservative (yet not overly so, for it would make it easy to destroy a candidate who is as socially conservative and as vocal about it as Palin and Huckabee are), who also has a track record of fiscal conservatism and who sympathizes with many libertarian policies. 

At this moment, it seems to me that neither Huckabee nor Palin nor Romney fit the bill (although Romney would certainly be a better choice than the other two). Jindal, however, does.

For Jindal, 2008 and especially 2009 offer a tremendous opportunity to raise his profile nationally, to court conservatives of all stripes and to implement policies rooted in conservatism. He will have to use his time in Louisiana in order to show voters that conservative policies work and improve their daily lives. He he has already done so to a tremendous degree, but the most difficult times are ahead of him. The recession is likely to worsen in the coming months with Americans in all states suffering financially. Jindal will have to control the damage and improve his state at the same time. 

If he does, and if he reaches out to conservative aaries in 2012. ctivists, think tankers, academics and journalists, he could very well be the Republican to beat in late 2011, early 2012.

©2008 PoliGazette. All Rights Reserved.

Not only will these automakers cease to exist in the middle to long run, they should have collapsed years ago already. They exist only because the federal government, and other foreign governments, have helped them out time and again.

The ‘big three’ want the U.S. government to bail them out once again because, so they say, their collapse would jeopardize the entire U.S. economy. They compare themselves to the financial institutions the government bailed out weeks ago, arguing that they too are an essential part of the U.S. economy: if they would fall, millions of jobs would disappear, and the economy as a whole would collapse.

Although the argument may make sense to those who work for the three automakers or are dependent on them (lobbyists) in D.D., it does not to virtually everyone else. If the big three would disappear the economy would certainly suffer a bit. Compared to the collapse of the financial institutions in dire need earlier this year, however, automakers can be considered irrelevant. They will cause some pain, but they cannot possibly take the entire economy with them. Simply put, only a few businesses and individuals are dependent on the automakers for their livelihood. If the three would collapse, some businesses would fall with them, but healthy businesses in the autosector will survive, and the rest of the economy will hardly notice the death of the U.S. auto industry at all.

Additionally, the author points out that these companies “will need divine—not government—intervention to survive.”

The math is simple: “General Motors alone burned about $5 billion a month for the last quarter and is expected to completely exhaust its kitty by the end of this year. (The other two will follow suit shortly after.) At that rate of cash burn, the bailout money translates into five more months of life.”

A comeback would rather obviously “be hard to pull off even if these were the best run companies on the planet, rather than ones debilitated by decades of labor intransigence and management incompetence, two characteristics that show few signs of abating.”

If they want to survive in the long run, or even in the middle run, they will have to produce cars now that will convince Americans to get rid of their “Hondas and Toyotas” in order to buy American cars. This requires the big three to “offer something radically—not just marginally—better. They will have to invent irresistibly sexy cars and sell them at super attractive prices—and still turn a profit.”

Since “this will require a degree of new thinking and innovation that their command-and-control corporate cultures haven’t supported in a long time” and they only have five months to do so, the big three, and U.S. Congress, should wake up to reality: these businesses can only survive for a year or two if the government is willing to pump many billions, hundreds of billions even, into them. Even if that would happen, the companies involved would not be able to compete with the Asian ‘tigers’ in the long run, meaning they will disappear in the end no matter what because the government will simply be unable (and unwilling) to continue supporting them.

In addition to the above, Dalmia argues that bailing out businesses time and again will not “encourage them to reinvent themselves—exposing them to the full force of the gales of creative destruction will.”

No, the big three will have to go. The U.S. government should let them fall. When they do, employers and employees in this sector will have to focus on other areas and products, work in sectors that can compete internationally, making the U.S. economy stronger rather than weaker. Creative destruction is not merely a fancy economic theory; it is reality. Bailing out dying businesses weakens the economy as a whole, causing everyone to suffer in the end.

Just ask the Soviets; they perfected the art of keeping dying businesses artificially alive and paid dearly for it.

©2008 PoliGazette. All Rights Reserved.

He said so in response to questions whether he would support India if it would use military force against terrorists in Pakistan.

During the election campaign, Obama said that the U.S. had the right to strike against terrorist training camps inside Pakistan if it deemed doing so necessary. Obama’s reaction to the terrorist attack in India shows that he does not merely believe that the U.S. but also others have the right to protect itself against terrorists.

Although Obama said that the U.S. should be willing to strike against terrorist targets in Pakistan, many left-wing columnists and bloggers thought he was ‘one of them,’ meaning a foreign policy dove. His reaction to the attack in India, however, shows that not progressives but moderates were right about the foreign policy Obama would pursue: it seems increasingly clear that Obama is a foreign policy pragmatist willing to use force when necessary.

Some left-wing blogs, Firedoglake for instance, are starting to understand the above as well. The blog’s Ian Welsh comments: “The American doctrine that it’s ok to bomb other countries if you invoke the word ‘terrorism’ is a very dangerous one.  Combined with the breaking up of Serbia, it is an assault on the over 350 year old idea of Westphalian internal sovereignty.  The consequences could be war between Pakistan and India, just as Georgia’s breakup by the Russians was justified by the example of Serbia.”

To be sure, Obama did say that India should only act unilaterally when the ‘international community’ and / or Pakistan do not act in a satisfying manner, but since ’satisfying’ probably means ‘wiping out entire terrorist camps, the caveat is reasonably useless.

Of course, the question is not whether India has the right to attack terrorists in Pakistan: it does. The main question is whether it would be wise for India to do so.

To this, I think the answer should be a resounding ‘no.’

India and Pakistan have been enemies for decades. The two governments hated each other and fought against each other, often via proxies, for years. India is Pakistan’s main enemy and vice versa. India counts quite some Hindu extremists, and Pakistan has a very serious Muslim extremist problem. If India would drop bombs in Pakistan, you can bet on it that the Pakistani people will demand revenge from their government. If Asif Ali Zardari remains silent and conciliatory, he risks being removed by either ‘the people’ or the army.

Considering the already existing tensions in Pakistan, a military or, worse, an Islamist coup would be utterly disastrous. It would jeopardize the security and stability of the entire region: lest we forget, Pakistan is a nuclear country.

On the other hand, if Zardari would fire back, the situation could escalate into a full scale war; never a pleasant experience, especially not when both sides have nuclear weapons.

As such, using force against India is not an option for Zardari, but remaining silent and doing nothing is not either.

Obama is right: India has the right to protect itself. But one can only hope that India will let Pakistan and the U.S. take care of the problem, for Indian involvement would escalate the crisis tremendously.

©2008 PoliGazette. All Rights Reserved.

Now that he has won, however, Obama is quickly transforming into a different kind of future president: his foreign policy picks imply that he will most certainly not adopt a ‘dovish liberal foreign policy.’ Instead, he has surrounded himself by foreign policy realists and even liberal hawks such as Clinton, who will be his Secretary of State.

At the same time, Obama still seems bend on implementing reasonably progressive domestic policies. If left up to him and the Democratic-ruled Congress, limits on abortion will be done away with, stem cell research will be funded fully, the ‘gap’ between ‘rich and poor’ will be decreased, and federal spending may increase significantly in the coming four years while it will not receive (much) more tax revenue.

In other words, Obama could very well be a man who receives general support for his foreign policy, while the real battles of his presidency will take place in the domestic arena. Media have long reported that Obama and his main advisers put together a transition team before the election so that the first 100 days of Obama’s presidency would be “productive.”

“Productive” rather obviously refers to his domestic policies rather than his foreign policy.

So this is where the major battles will take place. We will see whether he will, in this area, do what he promised liberal activists - namely to close the gap between the rich and poor, to start grand initiatives aimed at ‘redoing’ society, helping unions become more powerful and influential, and so on - or whether he will be afraid that doing so in his first two years in office may hurt the Democratic Party’s chances of holding on to their majorities in Congress in 2010 and possibly even jeopardize his reelection.

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