Ross Douthat explains the wishful thinking behind the Left’s insistence on nuclear disarmament:

It’s precisely because the proliferation problem is so difficult, though, that the “Global Zero” movement can feel superficially appealing. . . . By making the issue bigger, long-term, and more theoretical, they can almost make it seem to go away.

Douthat is exactly right. The Left has, in fact, developed an across-the-board dependence on the Brobdingnagian solution in the sky. Health-care woes? Seize the whole system and cover everyone. A recession? Throw nearly a trillion dollars at the economy and hope for the best. Climate change? Ask the entire planet to alter its behavior.  Dangerous regimes acting up? Offer a blanket apology. All-inclusive responses to specific challenges.

You can’t blame them, in a sense. We’ve seen how the Democrats handle intricacies. Remember the president’s attempts to articulate the nuances of Obamacare?

The subheading of the Economist’s new “Facing up to China” article reads, “Making room for a new superpower should not be confused with giving way to it.” Darn right! About time someone said … wait, what?

Making room? A new superpower? If you’re taking those for granted, then you can hardly remove “giving way” from the discussion. In recent years, Westerners have adopted a habit of labeling potential challenges “inevitable” and then shading their self-imposed impotence as partnership or diplomacy or, heaven help us, smart power.

The rise of China is certainly the most glaring example, but think of the other distasteful “inevitabilities” we invoked as causes for recent paralysis. In 2007, Time magazine coronated Vladimir Putin, making him Man of the Year for turning Russia into a “critical linchpin of the 21st century.” Meanwhile, Russia was and is in a demographic death spiral and its fragile economy was not rocked, but decimated, by the global recession. No matter, a year after the Time honor, the Man of the Year invaded sovereign Georgia. A year after that, he’s still there. The U.S. has been sitting on its hands the whole time.  Now Putin is playing games with us on the Iran nuclear question. This isn’t to say that Time gave us our Russia problem. It’s just that in the age of post-everything interconnectedness, America should remember it’s still allowed to push back against an ugly world. We need not help the bad guys ascend.

Speaking of which, consider how Barack Obama’s unstoppable Iran engagement came to the tragic rescue of the regime in Tehran. He famously “bore witness” to Ahmadinejad’s crimes because regime change seemed unthinkable. Now, however, even the realists are on board to topple the mullahs.

There are more examples, of course. Iraq was “inevitably” lost, a conviction that has locked the U.S. into a dangerously defeatist stance even as we achieve near-silent victory there.

In these we see a striking failure of imagination. One hesitates to throw the “hope and change” noise back in the faces of the Obama administration and its fans yet again, but the truth is that those two words have come to stand as markers for bottomless chasms in the Left’s disposition. Chinese superpower is as inevitable as we allow it to be. Google certainly seems less than resigned to it. After all, what seems more likely: that the U.S. can happily make room for a China that will, in the Economist’s words, “take up its share of the burden of global governance” or that the U.S. and its traditional allies can knock China significantly off course? The latter is certainly made more difficult by an unfounded faith in the former.

The New York Times asks, “Are the missteps at the White House rooted in message or substance?”

The question is not quite right. A better one is: Was there ever substance behind the message? Every talking point Barack Obama has attempted to turn into policy went to dust in his hands. His missteps came from thinking that message is substance.

The funny thing is that the White House plans to make a comeback by digging in on the message front. The Times reports on tonight’s State of the Union address: “The speech will be punctuated with a handful of new ideas — calling for a spending freeze on a portion of the domestic budget — but aides said it would largely be an opportunity for Mr. Obama to return to the proposals that swept him into office.”

What proposals? To close Gitmo, ram through universal health care, rally against Wall Street, dismantle the War on Terror, apologize for America’s sins at every turn, and blame George W. Bush for everything? He can’t very well “return to” the bad ideas he’s held fast to all along. The problem is that what swept him into office is exactly what fails as policy: vague, naive, left-wing children’s stories.

The president has tried to camouflage his policy failings in half-commitments and contradictions. This tactic has put Obama in a deeper hole than people are acknowledging. He now has nowhere to go, because in his effort to be politically elusive, he’s already been everywhere. Consider the range of criticisms thrown his way. He’s been a cozy friend of big business, an enemy of capitalism, an American apologist, an American war-monger, a populist, and an elitist. The country is sick of the Man of a Thousand Political Disguises.

Remember Obama’s big revelatory line? “I am new enough on the national political stage to serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views. As such I am bound to disappoint some, if not all of them.” He phrased it as if he were talking about a hindrance, but a year later it’s clear he believed it to be an asset. After all, Obama could have corrected this perception very easily. Being “new enough” doesn’t make you a blank screen; being opaque does.

Now, Barack Obama isn’t even new. His act has gotten so old so fast he no longer holds his own attention at the lectern. Yet he continues to insult Americans by thinking he can still effortlessly hold ours.

Thomas Friedman, New York Times, January 12, 2010:

More and more Chinese students educated abroad are returning home to work and start new businesses. … One of the biggest problems for China’s manufacturing and financial sectors has been finding capable middle managers. The reverse-brain drain is eliminating that problem as well.

David Wessel, Wall Street Journal, January 26, 2010:

Most foreigners who came to the U.S. to earn doctorate degrees in science and engineering stayed on after graduation—at least until the recession began—refuting predictions that post-9/11 restrictions on immigrants or expanding opportunities in China and India would send more of them home. … Among 2002 graduates, 92% of the Chinese and 81% of the Indians were in the U.S. after five years; in contrast, 41% of South Koreans and 52% of Germans were.

Brain drain, indeed.

A question about Barack Obama is starting to take shape in the American mind: where does this stop? The “this” is the collective hodgepodge of delinquent policy, administrative incompetence, a bottomless capacity for self-delusion, hubris, and the vetoing of American opinion. The “this” is comprised of attempts to harness populist disaffection in order to create a diversion, the presidential campaign that never ends, the 24/7 up-and-down-the-dial interview blitz, the hyper-partisan “post-partisanship,” and, foremost, the compulsion to lay all blame at the feet of the previous president.

Back in October, Charles Krauthammer called Obama’s incessant denunciation of George W. Bush “disgusting.” Three months later, and still going strong, the habit is bordering on eccentric. Not merely in its preponderance, but in kind. Consider that Obama explained away Republican Scott Brown’s Massachusetts victory as resulting from Americans’ anger over the “past eight years.” A Republican won because of the voters’ rage toward Bush?

Also bordering on the eccentric is the president’s endless infatuation with his own story. On the 20^th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Obama noted how the Soviet Union’s collapse paved the way for his path to the White House. He thought the Olympics would be in the bag if he flew to Copenhagen and recited a tale from the Book of Barack. When he went to Massachusetts to stump for Martha Coakley, he told the audience, “So it’s good to be back in Boston. . . I came back here a few years ago and gave a little speech that turned out pretty well.” This was a reference to the electrifying DNC Convention speech that made him a star. “Something about Boston folks have just always been good to me,” he said, as if the people of Massachusetts were obligated to uphold this benevolent tradition. This time he was heckled and the state took a fatal chunk out of his agenda.

And it is courting eccentricity to remain unable to take a definitive position: to amplify and wind down the same war in the same speech, to simultaneously rescue and punish big banks, to overrule the voters who put him in office and to “never stop fighting” for them.

Early in his presidency, Obama spoke of his belief in persistence. But his dogged effort to force his left-wing square-peg agenda into the moderate round hole of American politics feels more like an unhealthy obsession. He tried to “jam it down Americans’ throats.” Fine. But to keep jamming even after the public has regurgitated in such dramatic fashion?

For all this, Obama makes a tremendous show of his cool nerves. “I don’t rattle,” he said. In a way, that’s true. Blaming Republican failings for the Massachusetts Republican victory, for example, is not a sign of being rattled. It’s a sign of disconnected logic, a much more exotic subconscious defense. It requires a lot of psychological reapportioning not to get rattled while flailing on the world stage. Instead of losing your cool, you indulge in excessive denial or projection or sublimation. Something, after all, has got to give. It’s becoming clear that something is giving. As the Las Vegas Review-Journal’s Sherman Frederick put it, “this kind of weird delusion is consistent with the unbounded hubris of Team Obama.”

During the campaign, we heard endlessly about Barack Obama’s “presidential temperament.” But a few observers thought of it more as a strange placidity. What, in fact, is presidential about terminal aloofness? He’s the chief executive of a country that’s fighting two wars, struggling to get out from under an unprecedented financial breakdown, staring a near-nuclear Iran in the face, and on the constant receiving end of terrorist threats. Yet the most fired up we’ve ever seen Obama was when he decided a Cambridge Massachusetts police officer was “stupid” for inconveniencing his friend with a request to show ID. His second most animated moment came when some nobodies crashed his dinner party. What’s worrisome in this pattern is the president’s attachment to the personal. If we acknowledge that Obama weighs everything first by the degree to which it redounds on him personally, his failings are not so mysterious. If Obama has not conveyed to Americans that he hears their concerns, it may be because he doesn’t hear them. He merely hears pointers for his perpetual image upkeep.

Which makes you wonder where it ends. An object in motion stays in motion unless acted upon by external force. But for Obama, it’s all internal, personal.

What speaker of truth has the president’s ear? Is there a White House break man to slow this runaway train? Or are there only yes-men, mutes, and passive-aggressive leakers? How welcome some of the old Bush-style administration in-fighting would be right about now.

Of course, the President invites the harshest judgments. By continuing to campaign instead of lead he asks to be assessed as someone who has not yet proven himself. He forces comparisons with those he campaigned against. And so it is no surprise that the public is once again split between the general election tickets. If Obama is in campaign mode, why shouldn’t the electorate follow suit? The difference between today and 2008 is that today Obama can’t have his clean slate back.

Tuesday, January 12 was a hard day for Thomas Friedman. Or at least it turned into one. That morning, the New York Times ran Friedman’s latest—and possibly last—900 word panegyric to the unstoppable wonder of China’s economy. His column had, as it occasionally does, a personal edge. He was essentially writing to the American investor James Chanos. Friedman had read that Chanos thinks the Chinese bubble is about to burst and is looking to short China’s economy for profit.

And undo all Friedman’s cheerleading??? No sir. Friedman explained to Chanos, and to us, that while China has some things to deal with, “(the most dangerous being pollution)… it also has a political class focused on addressing its real problems, as well as a mountain of savings with which to do so (unlike us).”

You know, it’s not the cleanest place in the world, but its wise leaders will put a few billions toward a country-wide clean-up crew (hey, maybe they can put some of those good-for-nothing Charter 8 signatories and Uighers to work!) before their world domination gets properly started. Friedman’s parting shot was all class, maturity, and circumspection: “Shorting China today? Well, good luck with that, Mr. Chanos. Let us know how it works out for you.”

I’d imagine it’s working out rather well. For on the same morning, a shortsighted, ignorant little entity of no importance called Google announced that it too was shorting China, and ceasing to do business there so long as they had to comply with Beijing’s strict censorship requirements. This puts Chanos in fairly good company.

But did Google miss the Friedman memo? China is rich and focused, “unlike us.” Moreover, as Friedman never fails to mention, “China also now has 400 million Internet users, and 200 million of them have broadband,” —unlike us, of course. Invest away. Shockingly, Google had an issue with China that went beyond the country’s investment mechanics. As the company’s statement read, “we have discovered that the accounts of dozens of U.S.-, China- and Europe-based Gmail users who are advocates of human rights in China appear to have been routinely accessed by third parties.” Human rights? What does that mean? Any regular reader of Friedman knows that China’s is a “reasonably enlightened” dictatorship. How else could they achieve what Friedman calls their “Green Leap Forward,” “the most important thing to happen” in the first decade of this century? Google, it turns out, made a principled decision.

After this news broke, I wondered how Friedman would respond. Courtesy of yesterday’s New York Times, here comes his Yellow Leap Backward: “Your honor, I’d like to now revise and amend my remarks. There is one short position, one big short, that does intrigue me in China. I am not sure who makes a market in this area, but here goes: If China forces out Google, I’d like to short the Chinese Communist Party.”

You see, he’s still bullish on China, just bearish on the Chinese Communist Party. Makes perfect sense. Kind of like cheering the rise of eggs and the simultaneous demise of chickens. If it’s a confusing proposition, never fear. There is no wrong-headed opinion that Thomas Friedman cannot reduce to a childishly digestible formulation.

There are actually two Chinese economies today. There is the Communist Party and its affiliates; let’s call them Command China. These are the very traditional state-owned enterprises.

Alongside them, there is a second China, largely concentrated in coastal cities like Shanghai and Hong Kong. This is a highly entrepreneurial sector that has developed sophisticated techniques to generate and participate in diverse, high-value flows of business knowledge. I call that Network China.

It’s rare to see one wrestle so transparently with cognitive dissonance. Friedman asserted one thing about China. That thing was proved wrong in real time. To handle the contradiction, he splits China into two parts. What he said still applies to one China, not the other. Then he quotes some Non-Fiction Best-Sellerese from a recent book by John Hagel:

“Finding ways to connect with people and institutions possessing new knowledge becomes increasingly important,” says Hagel. “Since there are far more smart people outside any one organization than inside.” And in today’s flat world, you can now access them all.

Can you really? Here’s a challenge for Tom Friedman: There is a very smart person, a scholar even, named Liu Xiiaobo. Can Friedman reach out across “today’s flat world” and get in touch with him? You see, Liu was just sentenced to eleven years for “inciting subversion of state power” by the Chinese government. If Friedman gets hold of him, he should ask Liu which China he’s in. Maybe it’s called Autocratic China or, if we’re being adult about it, just China.

Let’s make it easier on Friedman. Finding one Chinese political prisoner in a sea of them is a bit daunting. How about he reaches out to one of the 20 million inhabitants of the Xinjiang region, where the Chinese government has blacked out all online access for an area three times the size of Texas. What is that China called? Is it safe to short?

Well, good luck with that, Mr. Friedman. Let us know how it works out for you.

Beijing is ready to say good-bye to Google. Wang Chen, China’s State Council Information Office minister, has responded to Google’s principled threat to pull out of China:

Our country is at a crucial stage of reform and development, and this is a period of marked social conflicts … Properly guiding Internet opinion is a major measure for protecting Internet information security. Internet media must always make nurturing positive, progressive mainstream opinion an important duty. Currently, the Internet gives space for spreading rumours and issuing false information and other actions that diminish confidence, and this is causing serious damage to society and the public interest.

Let’s put this retrograde autocratic boilerplate up against this week’s column by China fetishist Thomas Friedman. The multi-Pulitzer Man sounded, characteristically, indistinguishable from a China lobbyist:

All the long-term investments that China has made over the last two decades are just blossoming and could really propel the Chinese economy into the 21st-century knowledge age, starting with its massive investment in infrastructure. Ten years ago, China had a lot bridges and roads to nowhere. Well, many of them are now connected. It is also on a crash program of building subways in major cities and high-speed trains to interconnect them. China also now has 400 million Internet users, and 200 million of them have broadband. Check into a motel in any major city and you’ll have broadband access. America has about 80 million broadband users.

Poor, declining America. The writing is on the wall, isn’t it? A once-great nation is now muddling along with its quaint democratic government, passé freedoms, sub-bullet-speed trains and — the kiss of death for any great civilization — bad motel Internet.

That’s an interesting metric by which to assess superpower status. Friedman might want to put a little more weight on the fact that those 80 million Americans can perform what would constitute a Chinese Miracle: entering “Tiananmen massacre” into a search engine and getting a result. But no. Apparently “the 21st-century knowledge age” is best suited to states that systematically ban knowledge. The important thing is Jetsons-like rail travel. Here’s Friedman’s sci-fi-Wi-Fi obsession on particularly nasty display in a column from last week:

Being in China right now I am more convinced than ever that when historians look back at the end of the first decade of the 21st century, they will say that the most important thing to happen was not the Great Recession, but China’s Green Leap Forward. The Beijing leadership clearly understands that the E.T. — Energy Technology — revolution is both a necessity and an opportunity, and they do not intend to miss it.

We, by contrast, intend to fix Afghanistan. Have a nice day.

There’s the backward U.S. for you, focusing on terrorism and freedom when the future belongs to trains and laptops.

But what does Friedman do now? Upon his return to the impossibly slow U.S., how does he explain Google’s decision that human rights trump a share of the Chinese market? How does he discuss this without citing an old-fashioned American emphasis on liberty and justice? Whose side will Friedman and other China obsessives take? If other Internet and tech giants (grudgingly) follow, where does that leave his beloved regime?

The truth is that Wang Chen’s statement tells you everything you need to know about China’s supposedly inevitable rise. Beijing doesn’t enjoy enough legitimacy to allow its citizens to hear dissenting opinions. Without the free flow of ideas, China’s citizens will, in turn, remain insufficient to the task of true innovation. Instead, government-backed quasi-corporations will continue to tinker with gadgets from the disco era — bullet trains and solar power. The world’s Tom Friedmans will continue to swoon. Important technological innovation will come, inevitably, in a form few if any have predicted — let alone ranted about for years in the New York Times. And when it comes, it will come from a part of the world where disagreement and tension give birth to genius, not information blockades.

Even as the Obama administration abandons the long-standing American policy of supporting human rights and democracy abroad, other parties take up the torch to heartening effect. That, after all, is what it means to be a superpower: to embrace and offer compelling ideas that resonate in unexpected corners and live in unforeseen contingents. Ideas that, to some extent, do the work of advancing your interests for you. We saw this unfold with Iran’s pro-American democrats, and now we see it in the American corporate sector. Such displays of integrity can’t but shame cynics on their speed trains to magical futures.

It is, of course, axiomatic that George W. Bush was to blame for natural disasters that struck during his presidency. In the case of Hurricane Katrina, it goes without saying that Bush failed on three major fronts: First, he did not go back decades in time and demand construction of more resistant levies. Second, he did not force Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco to accept his offer of National Guard troops to help bail out New Orleans — when she refused, Bush didn’t invoke the Insurrection Act and invade a U.S. state. And third, as Al Gore helpfully pointed out, strong hurricanes are a more likely weather phenomenon when the U.S. ignores carbon-emissions warnings the way the Bush administration did.

And let’s not forget the wise words of one Kanye West, who, after the hurricane struck, told the country on national television, “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.”

An administration-defining, open-and-shut case if ever there was one.

But we didn’t know the half of it. As it turns out, Bush is also responsible for calamities occurring after his presidency. Mother Jones has the scoop on the master of natural disaster:

In the aftermath of September 11 and the Bush administration’s numerous adventures around the world, Haiti returned to its usual state of invisibility in Western eyes. Few people noticed a remarkable report that appeared in the New York Times in 2006, based in part on the analysis of former ambassador Brian Dean Curran, showing how US policy helped to destabalize [sic] Haiti in the years leading up to 2004, when Aristede was again forced out by armed rebels under an accused death squad leader. … For the most part, Europe and the United States have continued to sit by as Haiti has grown poorer and poorer. … It is hard to imagine what a magnitude 7 earthquake might do to a city that on any ordinary day already resembles a disaster area.

Max Blumenthal weighs in with a far more sober reflection on the tragedy. “Of course, the earthquake can’t be blamed on the so-called Washington consensus.” Of course, Max. Good of you to point it out.

Or not. “However,” he goes on,

the Haitian government’s inability to mount even a band-aid relief effort, combined with the fact that the decimated rural economy has overwhelmed Port-au-Prince with new residents, placing enormous stress on its already inadequate infrastructure and leading to the mass casualties we are witnessing, are factors directly linked to American meddling.

In 2004, when the national press corps failed to report the American hand in the coup that overthrew Haitian President Jean Bertrand Aristide, I embarked on a long and exhaustive investigative report on role of right-wing operatives in Washington and Haiti in toppling the government.

Don’t you love the self-congratulatory bit at the end there?  Through his evident grief for dead, maimed, and mourning Haitians, Blumenthal courageously forces himself to settle some personal scores. “Below the fold I have reprinted my piece for Salon.com, “The Other Regime Change” (which the NY Times’ Walt Bogdanovich basically plagiarized), in full.” Never let a crisis go to waste, and all that.

There is bound to be more of this stuff to follow. There is no cliff over which the liberal establishment will not follow the fringe. Some high-profile op-eds blaming Bush should be hitting the New York Times any day now, just in time to coincide with his and Bill Clinton’s joint-effort to help Haiti recover.

Barack Obama has figured out what went wrong with Homeland Security this past Christmas: George W. Bush. “It’s becoming clear that the system that has been in place for years now is not sufficiently up to date to take full advantage of the information we collect and the knowledge we have,” Obama said Wednesday.

When you’re president of the United States, you can’t pass the buck to your superior. In response to this frustration, President Obama has developed what systems people like to call a “workaround”: He passes the buck to his predecessor. A lot.

He started blaming Bush during the presidential campaign, which was natural enough. Here is candidate Obama on Iran, for example: “It is time to turn the page on eight years of policies that have strengthened Iran and failed to secure America or our ally Israel.” But after becoming president, Obama just kept on going. On climate change: “After eight years in which there was resistance to even acknowledging the problem, I think my administration has been very clear that we intend to be a leader on this issue internationally.” On trying terror suspects: “The decisions that were made over the last eight years established an ad hoc legal approach for fighting terrorism that was neither effective nor sustainable.” And now, on the failed Christmas Day terror attack.

Here’s a prediction: Obama will find that he’s gone to the Blame Bush well one too many times. With the Christmas Day fiasco something has “become clear,” alright. But it’s not the failings of George W. Bush.  James Carafano of the Heritage Foundation notes, “Since 2001, there have been 28 failed terrorist attacks against the United States. That averages out to about three foiled attempts per year. That was until this year. This year there were six failed attempts that make 2009 a banner year — the most in one year.”  Unprecedented, as Obama likes to say. A historic first, as his supporters are fond of putting it. Well, you might say, that doesn’t mean that the Obama administration has necessarily opened us up to more attacks, right? Isn’t it fair to say that it has stopped more attacks? Not exactly.

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So Harry Reid gave America a lesson in the perils of Republican hesitance. Speaking of the health-care debate, Reid said:

“Instead of joining us on the right side of history, all Republicans have come up with is this: ‘Slow down, stop everything. Let’s start over.  You think you’ve heard these same excuses before? You’re right. In this country, there were those who dug in their heels and said, ‘Slow down. It’s too early. Let’s wait.’ “

He cited some examples of history’s naysayers: “Things aren’t bad enough about slavery,” he recalled them saying. “When women wanted to vote, slow down, there will be a better day to do that. … Some senators resorted to the same filibuster we hear today.”

Senator Reid is correct. We have seen this tap-the-brakes-while-Rome-burns approach before. “I think the thing I am going to do is recommend to my caucus is let’s just take it easy,” said Harry Reid, when questioned in September, about support for a troop buildup in Afghanistan. I don’t recall any Republicans filing his sentiment under the American pro-slavery movement.

In the New York Times, Robert Wright argues that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq served to radicalize Maj. Nidal Hasan, and that:

The Fort Hood shooting, then, is an example of Islamist terrorism being spread partly by the war on terrorism — or, actually, by two wars on terrorism, in Iraq and Afghanistan. And Fort Hood is the biggest data point we have — the most lethal Islamist terrorist attack on American soil since 9/11. It’s only one piece of evidence, but it’s a salient piece, and it supports the liberal, not the conservative, war-on-terrorism paradigm.

By this reckoning, facing down the Soviet Union was a failure because it radicalized Bill Ayers. (Never mind that Hasan was connected to radical imams before the U.S. was involved in either war.)

Wright’s argument shows us the shape of liberal things to come. When the Fort Hood attack first happened, liberals jumped into the breach to declare Hasan a nut job with no religious or political motivation. Within twenty-four hours they were buried with evidence to the contrary. If jihad can’t be painted over with a medical condition, what, then, is a good Lefty to do? Blame the U.S. for jihad, of course.

We’ve come full circle. When 9/11 happened it was our fault because we supported the Mujahadeen against the Soviets in Afghanistan. Eight years later, Fort Hood is our fault for fighting the operational offspring of the Mujahadeen.

Wright thinks he’s been terribly clever in managing to hoist us hawks by our own petards. “When the argument is framed like this, don’t be surprised if conservatives, having insisted that we not medicalize Major Hasan’s crime by calling him crazy, start underscoring his craziness.”

No sale. Hasan is not crazy. He is an Islamist terrorist who carried out a plan. Fortunately, our efforts in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere have killed thousands just like him.

Last week a former UN envoy to Afghanistan tried to tell me that average Pashtuns and other Afghans don’t really mind the Taliban and would therefore never side with the U.S. against them. One should show little tolerance for such arguments. They are contradicted by all recent polls of Afghan opinion, and depend on a chilling ignorance of things like this:

Taliban militants fighting the Afghan government in the latest wave of violence have beheaded two civilians in the western Farah province, a local newspaper reported Tuesday.

“The armed Taliban fighters kidnapped five persons in Khak-e-Safid district of Farah district Monday and beheaded two and released the remaining three after a few hours,” Arman-e-Millie said, Xinhua reported.

Evidence of blissful coexistence, no doubt. Here’s more, courtesy of Dexter Filkins in today’s New York Times: “American and Afghan officials have begun helping a number of anti-Taliban militias that have independently taken up arms against insurgents in several parts of Afghanistan, prompting hopes of a large-scale tribal rebellion against the Taliban. . . The plan echoes a similar movement that unfolded in Iraq, beginning in late 2006, in which Sunni tribes turned against Islamist extremists.”

Critics often say there is no clearly defined goal in Afghanistan. I submit that if anti-Taliban sentiment there were parlayed into something that resembles the Sunni Awakening in Iraq, it would mark the achievement of a goal almost too welcome to hope for: Afghanistan’s organic inoculation against the Taliban and al Qaeda.

Here’s the difference between Iraq and Afghanistan. In Iraq, the Sunnis realized that coalition forces were a) the strong horse, and b) sticking around. In Afghanistan, brave civilians taking up arms against the Taliban have no such reassurances. In fact, one hopes they didn’t hear President Obama say he’s “not interested in . . . sending a message that America—is here [in Afghanistan] for— for the duration.” Let’s also hope they didn’t hear Hillary Clinton say that “we have no long-term stake” in Afghanistan. As Gen. Stanley McChrystal put it, “A perception that our resolve is uncertain makes Afghans reluctant to align with us against the insurgents.” If in reality our resolve proves to be uncertain then we will have squandered an invaluable gift.

In any case, let’s stop this talk of tribal peoples who love their tormentors.

Thank goodness we have a president who is willing to “listen” to foreign governments, to “create space” for conflict resolution, to break America’s habit of “dictating” to those with whom it disagrees, to invite international institutions to “share” in the process of mitigating the world’s dangers. Without persistent Dr. Phil-diplomacy, we never could have achieved this:

United Nations and Iranian officials have been secretly negotiating a deal to persuade world powers to lift sanctions and allow Tehran to retain the bulk of its nuclear programme in return for co-operation with UN inspectors.

According to a draft document seen by The Times, the 13-point agreement was drawn up in September by Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), in an effort to break the stalemate over Iran’s nuclear programme before he stands down at the end of this month.

Forget the cooperation of Russia; forget the cooperation of Iran. The most benign and internationally beloved president in modern history can’t keep the intermediary bodies from secretly plotting against us. It’s useful to keep today’s revelation in mind when people go on about how George W. Bush spurned international bodies or about how the U.S. can’t be the world’s police. Perhaps Obama will get tough on the IAEA and register one of his bone-chilling warnings about his patience not being endless.

There are a slew of synonyms for the kind of popularity Obama has conferred upon America: adoration, affection, favor, and so on. But there is no usable replacement for respect. Respect comes when you draw a line. For this administration, there is no line. The uncooperativeness (forget evil) of bad actors never gets fully recognized. Because there is no line, the administration’s claims of progress are unfalsifiable. That is, they can never be disproved. Everything is endlessly encouraging.

Hey, you can’t blame ElBaradei for wanting to secure his legacy. You know what they say: You can never be too rich, too thin, or have too many Nobel Peace Prizes.

The New York Times is giving Barack Obama high marks for “push[ing] rights with Chinese students.” In Shanghai, Obama was asked via Internet, “Should we be able to use Twitter freely?” Here was the audacious answer:

“Well, first of all, let me say that I have never used Twitter,” he said. “My thumbs are too clumsy to type in things on the phone.”

OK, that wasn’t the audacious answer. That was the “self-effacing” appetizer that whets the appetite for the audacious answer:

“I should be honest, as president of the United States, there are times where I wish information didn’t flow so freely, because then I wouldn’t have to listen to people criticizing me all the time,” he said. But, he added, “because in the United States, information is free, and I have a lot of critics in the United States who can say all kinds of things about me, I actually think that that makes our democracy stronger and it makes me a better leader because it forces me to hear opinions that I don’t want to hear.”

Get it? Twitter should be used freely because Barack Obama manages to bravely endure the free flow of information in the U.S., and that makes him a better leader. Clumsy thumbs and all.

There is an Obama teaching-moment methodology. He has employed it to teach us mortals about America’s founding documents, to teach the International Olympic Committee why it should choose Chicago, and to teach Europeans why the fall of the Berlin Wall was so great: Look at what has worked so well to make me who I am. Follow that road and you shall be set free.

The sad truth is that Obama’s answer (without, of course, a simple “yes” in it) really is an administration high point for human rights. When Hillary Clinton visited China a few months back, she raised the topic only to announce her indifference to it. In other news, China detained dozens of dissidents in advance of Obama’s visit. That Beijing actually believed human-rights activists could move Barack Obama serves to demonstrate the extreme paranoia of the Communist party.

Barack Obama asked that we not “jump to conclusions” about Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, who is alleged to have killed 13 Americans at Fort Hood last Thursday. Forget “jump to.” If only President Obama would crawl toward, or flirt with, or even stumble upon a conclusion, I’d be overjoyed. On this you can rely: Obama will never express a conclusive opinion on last Thursday’s massacre.

Why, after all, would he start there? Iran has rejected our diplomatic overtures in ways big and small, covert and blunt, general and specific, for the entirety of Obama’s term so far, and the president is not ready to jump to any conclusions about a lack of Iranian cooperation. So America’s begging continues apace. Since early September, the White House has been contemplating a troop increase in Afghanistan. On that question the administration has blown past dithering and hit meta-dithering: that is, dithering about when the dithering will be complete. Press coverage no longer speculates about what Obama will actually choose to do in Afghanistan but about when he’ll let us know.

If looming threats of Iranian nukes and lost wars have no effect on the president’s Magic 8-Ball, why on earth would he ever find clarity about a shooting at an Army base? Funnily enough, pondering the case of Maj. Hasan actually demands one of Obama’s favorite tropes — the “false choice.” Two analytic camps have already formed in response to Thursday’s shooting. There are those who maintain that the bloodbath was the fulfillment of Islamist ideology, and there are those calling it a manifestation of mental illness. Since when are the two mutually exclusive? Have we already forgotten that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was both the operational leader of al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia and an authentic sociopath with a penchant for beheadings and the mass slaughter of fellow Muslims? His “mental illness” did not prevent him from nearly extinguishing the entire state of Iraq in a choreographed civil war. Who, after all, are the sworn enemies of reason if not those who exemplify unreason?

Crazy and evil get along just fine, thanks. And history shows they’re on occasional good terms with success. History also shows us the fatal costs of indecision and cowardice.

On October 2, the first day of high-level nuclear talks between the U.S. and Iran, Juan “Nostradamus” Cole wrote on his blog: “Barack Obama pwned Bush-Cheney in one day, and got more concessions from Iran in 7 1/2 hours than the former administration got in 8 years of saber-rattling.”

Did Cole nail it or what? In fact, he nwled it. That evil composite entity “Bush-Cheney” must now be kicking itself for not realizing all it could have gotten from Iran if it had only spent a year apologizing to the mullahs for a 65-year-old coup. Just look at what Obama accomplished: He effectively took the bombing option off the table, undermining any sense of credible American threat in Iran and far beyond. He alienated Iranian democrats. He put Iran on an equal footing with the U.S., France, and Russia for the whole world to see. He strained U.S. relations with England and France by rejecting their policy and rollout approaches to the revelation about the Qom enrichment facility. He undermined the international bodies he supposedly respects by effectively consenting to Iranian enrichment prohibited by international treaties. He turned his back on our Central European allies in a failed bid to get Russia in on a strict sanctions regime, and he proved himself weak and incompetent to the Kremlin.

Did I miss anything? Oh yeah, one small point: Iran will get the bomb.

But it was all worth it, because yesterday Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said, “We are ready to cooperate” with the West. And it’s not like Iran has been saying that for years or anything.

Such formidable “pwnership” is not confined to Iran policy, mind you. Look at today’s international headlines and you’ll see a virtual anthology of American incompetence. Hillary Clinton is in Pakistan catching heat over U.S. drone attacks, while the rest of her administration is back in Washington arguing in favor of more drones and fewer soldiers in the region.

While in Islamabad, Clinton hailed the “historic agreement” that the U.S. forced upon Honduras, enabling self-appointed strongman Manuel Zelaya to subvert his country’s democracy and reclaim the presidency.

This administration is on the wrong side of just about everything. What’s more, there’s not a single Plan B in sight.

What happens when the Ditherer in Chief meets the Supreme Dawdler?

Iran hinted Monday it could agree to ship some low-enriched uranium abroad for processing as reactor fuel as the world awaited its reply on a U.N.-drafted nuclear plan aimed at easing tensions with the West. …

The two-sided scenario presented by [Foreign Minister Manouchehr ] Mottaki appeared part of Iran’s strategy to drag out negotiations over its nuclear program and leave the West guessing about its decision expected later this week.

Good thing there’s not a nuclear-weapons program hanging in the balance.

So Iran’s decision is expected later this week, huh? The anticipation is really too much bear. Although I could have sworn that the deadline for Iran’s response was supposed to be last Friday. You want to have fun? Google the words “Iran” and “deadline.” You’ll come up with headlines like “Iran: There was no IAEA deadline,” “Iran Misses Nuke Deal Deadline,”  “Two-week Iran deadline not set ‘in stone’: State Department,” “Waiting for the deadline on Iran – again” “UK sets Iran deadline to end nuclear bomb work,” “IAEA sets deadline for Iran to suspend nuke program.”

Those last two are from 2004. By my watch, that makes the ayatollahs about five years late. But I’m sure later this week is really the end of the line.

Just to follow up on Jennifer’s post: the New York Times’s David Sanger, apparently filing from an alterate universe, writes about negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program, “The rare public argument under way in Iran about how to deal with the demands suggests that Mr. Obama has already achieved one of the major objectives of his engagement strategy: to force out into the open the splits in the Iranian leadership.”

Two things. First, “rare public argument” has been rendered a misnomer by the fraudulent election of June 12 and the unrest of its aftermath. Iran’s fractured leadership constitutes the central political spectacle in that country. Dissenting clerics are being treated as heretics and criminals by the Ahmadinejad-Basij-Khamenei thugocracy. It is arguably the most closely watched and most important international political upheaval on the world’s radar.

Second, not only has the split in Iranian leadership been public since June 12, but no public figure has done more to minimize the importance of that split than Barack Obama. He views any challenge to the ruling regime as an obstacle to engagement on the nuclear issue. Obama has bent over backward to help Tehran move past the post-election turmoil. As Basij batons cracked Iranian skulls and Basij bullets pierced Iranian hearts, the American president adopted an ameliorating tone, “bearing witness” to murderous injustice and, of course, the political split that lay behind it. Heaven forbid that American opinion be used as a “political football.”

It’s one thing to say Obama’s negotiation bid was worth a shot and, therefore, he was being pragmatic about ignoring the schism in Iran. It’s quite another to say the negotiation’s failure demonstrates that Obama has single-handedly freed the tongues of dissenters in Tehran. While Obama’s poll numbers drop, the adoring press finds more craven ways to rescue its hero. But if we end up on the wrong side of Iranian liberation, don’t expect the people of Iran to buy into the bailout.

Following on Jennifer’s post, and also according to Reuters, “Iran on Friday failed to accept a UN-drafted plan for it to cut a stockpile of nuclear fuel that the West fears could be used for weapons, instead calling for responses to its own proposal.” Thus, Obama’s not-so-revolutionary engagement strategy fizzles in a very ordinary, very Iranian dead end. Tehran was toying with us the whole time. Iran “negotiates” to buy time and legitimacy. It does not negotiate to resolve conflicts with the West. You’d think after 30 years the West would have discovered this much.

Far from it. The collection of breathless commentary about the “big victory” for Obama already undoubtedly at hand is now cringe-inducing. Thomas Barnett has a DOA piece over at Esquire’s website titled “So Iran Caved on the Bomb. What Now?” Yesterday, arms-control expert Peter Crail told the Christian Science Monitor, “At this point, it would be very difficult for Iran to back away from the deal altogether.” But the topper, for my money, was Kevin Sullivan’s attempt to dismiss the “neoconservative panic attacks” with this pearl:

I can’t help but wonder if those screaming of Iranian betrayal have ever had to haggle or negotiate for anything; like a used car, or a raise at work. I have, and I’ve always been told that you never walk in agreeing to the first offer or asking price if you think you can get something more to your liking.

How stunning that after three decades of dealing with a regime that is, at its core, animated by anti-Western sentiment, radical Shiism, a quest for nukes, and underhanded “negotiation,” the best the U.S. can do is see in the ayatollahs a bunch of savvy used-car shoppers. A few years ago, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad spoke before the UN, and afterward he claimed that no one in the audience blinked, so enthralled were they with his divine ability to convey the rightness and sanctity of the Islamic Republic. That’s no less preposterous than the fact that the supposedly incredulous West (governments, experts, and media alike) believed that Iran had suddenly become reasonable and trustworthy because . . . because, why, again?

Oh, that’s right — because we asked it too.

Funny which statements out of Moscow get American media attention. If while clearing his throat, Dmitry Medvedev creates a sound similar to sanctions, the murmur is hailed as a monumental step forward in American-Russian ice-breaking, a quantifiable vindication of both President Obama’s Russian reset policy and his engagement approach to defanging Iran. But what about something like this:

Russia on Thursday said it would continue military cooperation with Iran amid widespread unease in the West over Moscow’s controversial contract to sell advanced anti-aircraft missiles to Tehran.

“The Russian Federation implements and plans to further implement the military-technical cooperation with the Islamic Republic of Iran in strict accordance with existing legislation and its international obligations,” Russia’s Federal Service for Military and Technical Cooperation said.

That’s from Agence France-Presse. This statement of reassurance from our resetees to our engagees has yet to appear in any American report. The lag should give Secretary of State Hillary Clinton some time to whip up another batch of mechanical enthusiasm for our new Russian partners in the face of yet another blow. Remember, when the Kremlin shot her down on Iran sanctions a couple of weeks back, Clinton announced that she felt “very good” about the reset policy. Today’s news will undoubtedly find her ecstatic.

The Obama administration’s protracted share session on an Afghanistan troop buildup is turning into a debacle. The commander in chief looks weak and hapless. With Rahm Emanuel making the case for further dithering as Afghan elections get sorted out, and Robert Gates calling for a decision regardless of Afghan leadership, the president’s lauded “team of rivals” is now fractious and incoherent. He has lost the confidence of our allies. He’s losing (lost?) the confidence of his military and, frankly, at cross purposes with his commanders. Consider this:

“A perception that our resolve is uncertain makes Afghans reluctant to align with us against the insurgents.”  — Gen. Stanley McChrystal, in his submitted assessment of the Afghanistan war

“I’m not interested in just being in Afghanistan for the sake of being in Afghanistan or saving face or, in some way — you know, sending a message that America — is here for — for the duration.” — President Barack Obama, Meet the Press

Mission accomplished.

Obama desperately wants out of this war and is trying to find something, anything, that will allow the U.S. to move past Afghanistan. Raising troop levels and fighting a war until we’re victorious doesn’t comport with his vision of America’s place in the world. If he had his druthers, the U.S. would “bear witness” as the murderous retrograde Taliban surrounded Afghan cities and took absolute control over suffering Afghans. Perhaps a special envoy would be dispatched to Kabul with a failed scheme to bribe opium farmers into growing grapes.

Afghanistan was a useful campaign tool but is now an unsightly leftover from George W. Bush. The problem is that the White House would happily leave with a win or a draw, but try as they might, every quick fix spells defeat. What’s left? Paralysis. How could the president possibly have handled this worse?

Rick and Jennifer, don’t hold your breath waiting for Barack Obama to change his mind and commemorate the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Obama sees it as his job to move us (as in the people of planet Earth) past the “the cleavages of a long gone Cold War.” That’s how he put it in his UN address a few weeks ago.

The Cold War is not merely ancient history to our president; its memory constitutes an obstacle to a “reset” with Russia and to his vision of a mutually collaborative future for all nations. Let’s not dwell on the past — too many skeletons in the imperial closet. A communist world versus a free one, you say? Don’t be so dramatic. Washington and Moscow were the Hatfields and McCoys, fighting so long they forgot what they were fighting about. No need to rub the Kremlin’s face in defeat. Putin might get sore and stop telling us what to do next.

As for Germany and Merkel, Obama covered that at the UN too: “alignments of nations” rooted in that same ancient Cold War “make no sense.” Why give a friendly European democracy the false impression that we’re on its side? What would all the unfriendly autocratic regimes think?

For Obama, the 40th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall presents a spectacular opportunity: to place himself, and America as he sees it, outside the constraints of history, where the important work of Utopianism can be properly undertaken. He wouldn’t miss missing it for the world.

Senators Bob Casey and Sam Brownback are asking Barack Obama to sign the Iran Sanctions Enabling Act into law. The bill, introduced by Casey and Brownback in May, provides a clear and legitimate legal basis for states to divest pension funds from Iran’s energy sector.

Eighteen states have already divested from the Iranian energy sector. But, as the senators explain, doing so means “operating in a legal fog, unsure if the laws will get struck down under the doctrine of federal preemption.” Their bill, if signed into law, lifts that fog.

But the fog surrounding the Obama administration’s Iran strategy is another matter. There is not a single valid reason for Barack Obama not to support this bill. As a senator, he introduced similar legislation alongside Casey and Brownback and was highly critical of Republicans who voted the previous bill down and “put partisanship ahead of our national security and the security of our ally Israel.” On the other hand, as president, Obama has gone out of his way to avoid taking quantifiable steps against Iran. His doctrine of engagement has led him to bend over backward to support the Iranian regime and its “right” to peaceful nuclear energy. Obama’s strategy of knocking Iran off its weaponization course with a fatal barrage of American respect has only given the Iranian regime diplomatic cover behind which the centrifuges continue to spin.

The administration has gotten itself in double trouble with its Russian reset. After failing to gain leverage with Iran, Obama scrapped our Central European missile-defense assets and threw out any leverage regarding Russia, too.

So instead of trying to read the tea leaves to determine what, if anything, the Russians are willing to do on Iran, perhaps we can have the president clarify his own policy. With our long-shot options seeming to vanish before our eyes, it’s long past time for concrete American action. Surely it wouldn’t be too much for Obama to sign the Casey-Brownback bill, would it?

Jen, I disagree slightly with your take on Hillary’s Russian train wreck. I suspect that the Obama administration wants the leverage of tougher sanctions with Iran. The problem is that they now have no leverage with Russia.

All the diplomatic pillow talk about “cooperation” and “encouragement” is cover for Obama’s Russia gambit’s having gone down in flames. Smiling through failure is becoming the default occupation of the Obama State Department, and no one seems more enthused to be at the center of the wreckage than Hillary Clinton. She is pure spin, no success.

There are two looming questions: Will the day come when the Obama administration accepts that doormat power has failed? And if so, how does the U.S. go from being a doormat back to being a global player? As to the first question, reality must intervene at some point, if for no other reason than optics: Obama is keenly aware that he’s starting to look soft even to ardent supporters.

The second question is trickier. Every failed attempt to curry favor through self-debasement puts us further behind the eight ball. We are not merely failing to get the world to act in accordance with our wishes; we are enabling enemies who work against us and forcing former allies to defy us. By the time Obama and Hillary are forced to admit failure, America will have emptied its toolbox, antagonists will be enjoying a golden age of cooperation, and allies will have cynically adjusted to American indifference.

Why would Obama have to do anything to earn the Nobel Peace Prize? Has everyone forgotten how he became president of the United States?

If proof of achievement mattered, John McCain would be in the White House, American troops returning from Iraq could expect coast-to-coast victory parades, and Iran would already be doing something new with the land that had once housed its nuclear facilities.

Today we only deal in make-believe. The Left abhors evidentiary standards. There is global warming in the absence of rising temperature, Israeli war crimes in the absence of unlawful conduct, institutionalized racism in the absence of prejudicial treatment, American imperialism in the absence of empire, and so on.

Seeing what isn’t there is half the job of being on the Left. The other half is changing what isn’t there through costly, intrusive, and ill-conceived initiatives (save 10 percent for keeping Charlie Rangel out of trouble).

One of the defining features of conservatism is that it sees the world as it is. The universal stupefaction over today’s announcement feels like a conservative spasm. At the New York Times’s blog, even Nicholas Kristof wrote that Obama should only get the prize “after he has actually made peace somewhere.” Joe Klein called it “premature to the point of ridiculousness.” Whether or not Obama is embarrassed by the absurdity, one gets the feeling that, for the rest of the country, this was one unearned decoration too far.

The question is: Can a spasm disturb an all-encompassing worldview? When Obama got elected, it was obvious to many that delusion had triumphed in America. Citizens of the U.S. are the most sensible in the Western world. Surely if we had finally fallen for Utopian promises and what Fouad Ajami has called the “politics of charisma,” the rest of the West was already there. But today’s announcement out of Norway struck more or less everyone here as ridiculous — which is an indication that America’s experiment in mass delusion may be coming to an end, even if the president has yet to catch up.