Fred Thompson: The US military is in trouble and it’s Bill Clinton’s fault.

A TPM Reader responds …

But there’s a reason for all these post-mortems: President Bush made the promotion of democracy abroad a centerpiece of his rhetoric, a touchstone of his public pronouncements. This administration has a genius for packaging its policies to appeal to ideals that the public cherishes, especially when its actions diverge most sharply from those ideals. That’s why when we aligned ourselves with odious and repressive regimes around the world in our war on terror we did so under the guise of spreading freedom. “Promoting Democracy” turns out to have been of a piece with the “Clean Skies” and “Healthy Forests” initiatives; asking what has happened to the “freedom agenda” is like asking what has happened to the president’s defense of the environment. He hasn’t just given us more of the same, he has covered the fact that he was making things worse by loudly proclaiming that he was making them better.

I take this point. There needs to be an accounting and Baker’s article in the Post provides it. I guess all I’m saying is that it’s worth keeping in mind that this wasn’t a bold initiative that fell short for whatever reasons. It was, to paraphrase Bertrand Russell’s famous interlocutor, claptrap all the way down.

Another outbreak of sanity from Obama sure too raise profound questions about whether he’s ready to be president.

From the AP …

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is leaping into the long-running Cuba debate by calling for the United States to ease restrictions for Cuban-Americans who want to visit the island or send money home.

Obama’s campaign said Monday that, if elected, the Illinois senator would lift restrictions imposed by the Bush administration and allow Cuban-Americans to visit their relatives more frequently, as well as ease limits on the amount of money they can send to their families.

From an interview with Ahmed Rashid, Pakistani scholar and expert on the connection between the Pakistani military and Muslim extremist groups …

Until Bush came into office, Ahmed thought his words mattered to America. In the 1980s, he discussed Taliban resistance with ambassadors over tea. In the 1990s, he collaborated with policymakers to raise Afghanistan’s profile in the Clinton White House. But during the Bush administration, he feels his risky research has been for naught.

The administration has “actively rejected expertise and embraced ignorance,” Ahmed told me inside his fortress. Soon after the Taliban fled Kabul in late 2001, Ahmed visited Washington DC’s policy elite as “the flavor of the month.” His bestseller Taliban had come out just the year before. The State Department, USAID, the National Security Council and the White House all asked him to present lectures on how to stabilize post-war Afghanistan.

Ahmed traversed the city’s bureaucracies and think tanks repeating “one common sense line”: In Afghanistan you have a “population on its knees, with nothing there, absolutely livid with the Taliban and the Arabs of Al Qaeda . . . willing to take anything.” The U.S. could “rebuild Afghanistan very quickly, very cheaply and make it a showcase in the Muslim world that says ‘Look U.S. intervention is not all about killing and bombing; it’s also about rebuilding and reconstruction…about American goodness and largesse.”

Many lifelong bureaucrats specializing in the region shared Ahmed’s enthusiasm, and they agreed that after decades of violence, America could finally turn Afghanistan around through aid. But the biggest players in Bush’s government, Ahmed says, had already shifted their attention to Iraq “abandoning Afghanistan at its moment of need.”

The claim that President Bush took his eyes off the ball in Afghanistan so he could rush into disaster in Iraq has been repeated so many times that it is almost a cliche. A true cliche. But something like a cliche nonetheless. It becomes shocking again, however, when you look at it up close. The most charged issue in the US — at least at the headline level — is the failure to bag bin Laden. But that’s not the only issue, in some ways not even the most important one because actually transforming Afghanistan (if that was possible, which I won’t pretend to know the answer to) would at least arguably have been of more consequence that killing or capturing this one man.

And as long as we’re on the subject, let’s track back to our earlier discussion of President Bush’s bogus ‘democracy promotion agenda.’ Remember, US policy makers have always been happy to push democracy on enemy states or among friends where there were no potential adverse policy consequences. The rub is always balancing support for democracy and the rule of law with more immediate policy needs.

So who are our main allied states in the War on Terror and the Muslim Middle East generally? The answer? Unquestionably, I think, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia — one military dictatorship (if one with semi-constitutional and parliamentary attributes), with a military with a long history of ties to radical Islamists and another hereditary despotism riddled with sympathizers with radical Islamists.

Hold on tight! Mike Huckabee rides the Iowa Straw Poll bump. That and other political news of the day in today’s Election Central Happy Hour Roundup.

From the Baltimore Sun …

But for those trained to hear the subtleties, Mr. Romney was acknowledging something more. He implied an opposition to the birth control pill and a willingness to join in their efforts to scale back access to contraception. There are code phrases to listen for – and for those keeping score, Mr. Romney nailed each one.

One code phrase is: “I fought to define life as beginning at conception rather than at the time of implantation.” The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists defines pregnancy as starting at implantation, the first moment a pregnancy can be known. Anti-abortion advocates want pregnancy to start at the unknown moment sperm and egg meet: fertilization. They’d also like you to believe, despite evidence to the contrary, that the birth control pill prevents that fertilized egg from implanting in the womb.

Mr. Romney’s code, deciphered, meant, “I, like you, hope to reclassify the most commonly used forms of contraceptives as abortions.” In fact, he told the crowd, he already had some practice redefining contraception: “I vetoed a so-called emergency contraception bill that gave young girls abortive drugs without prescription or parental consent.”

I’m lucky I live in New York. Because if national politics ever settles down I’ll have New York politics to keep me entertained. I think of it as sort of an occupational insurance policy.

A short while ago, aides to Gov. Spitzer (D) got caught in some dirty trick shenanigans employed against one of the governor’s rivals, state GOP kingpin Joe Bruno. The stunts appear to have fallen short of illegality. But they’ve been more than enough to take some of the luster off Spitzer’s good guy crusading image. Republicans in Albany are investigating what happened and possibly other stuff earlier in Spitzer’s career. And they must really feel like spicing things up because they’ve hired none other than ubiquitous GOP operative-cum-yakmeister Roger Stone to help out in whatever way in knocking Spitzer around.

Now, you’ve got to have some sense of Stone’s background to get the full flavor of this story. Suffice it to say that Roger Stone must be awfully friggin’ good at being an operative because only that explains how he keeps getting hired notwithstanding a series entertaining press stories about Stone in his own right. (To get your own research started, try googling ‘roger stone and swinger’.) He actually did play a key role in shutting down the Florida Recount in 2000. So I guess you could say he is pretty good at what he does. Needless to say, Stone has his own website, the aptly named StoneZone.

In any case, as I said, Stone is working for state Republicans and apparently the Empire State GOPers are considering looking into Spitzer’s dad’s finances too. But it appears Stone got a little hot under the collar in his pursuit of the anti-Spitzer jihad, apparently going so far as to leave an unhinged message on Pop Spitzer’s answering machine.

Here we pick up the story from the sedate pages of the hometown paper …

The message, left at Bernard Spitzer’s Manhattan office just before 10 p.m. on Aug. 6, says that Mr. Spitzer, 83, a wealthy real estate developer, would be “compelled by the Senate sergeant at arms” to testify about “shady campaign loans” he made to his son during Eliot Spitzer’s unsuccessful campaign for attorney general in 1994.

Mr. Winner’s committee has been holding hearings into a scheme by some of Governor Spitzer’s top aides to use the State Police to embarrass the Senate Republican leader, Joseph L. Bruno. Senate Republicans have said they were considering reviewing Bernard Spitzer’s 1994 loans to his son.

“If you resist this subpoena, you will be arrested and brought to Albany,” the message says, according to a transcript. The message also calls Governor Spitzer a “phony” and a “psycho.”

That led Spitzer’s dad to hire a private security agency which … well, back to the Grey Lady …

Bernard Spitzer’s lawyers hired Kroll Associates, the private investigative firm, to trace the message, and their report was included with the letter to Mr. Winner. The firm traced the number that appeared on Mr. Spitzer’s caller identification system, linking it to listings under the name of Mr. Stone’s wife, Nydia.

“The review of publicly available records,” the report says, “strongly suggests that the number is controlled by Roger Stone.”

Digital recordings were also sent to Mr. Winner, including the audio of the voice mail message and “a sample of Roger Stone’s voice from a broadcast interview” to allow for comparison. The Times was given a copy of both recordings, but was unable to draw any conclusions about whether Mr. Stone’s voice was on Mr. Spitzer’s phone message.

In the message, the caller says, referring to a potential subpoena: “There is not a goddamn thing your phony, psycho, piece-of-shit son can do about it. Bernie, your phony loans are about to catch up with you. You will be forced to tell the truth and the fact that your son’s a pathological liar will be known to all.”

Now, Stone concedes the phone is his. But Stone, who’s known as a consumate dirty-trickster alleges what perhaps might be considered the ultimate dirty trick as his exculpatory theory. Stone points out that his apartment building is owned by a prominent Spitzer fundraiser and that it would be no difficult matter for him to let Spitzer operatives in to his apartment for a set-up job.

Said Stone to the Times: “They have unfettered access to my apartment. I am on television constantly. As Gore Vidal said, never pass up the chance to have sex or be on television. Putting together a voice tape that sounds like me wouldn’t be hard to do.”

You almost get the sense that Stone is letting projection get the better of him in this little tear. And those apropos of nothing references to tv and sex, I’m not sure what to make of those other than I’m pretty sure the Times reporter got a pretty big kick out of including them in Stone’s denial.

In any case, I guess the rule of thumb is that if you get a harassing phone call and it’s traced back to the phone of one of your political enemies and the voice on the phone sounds like your enemy, then Occam’s Razor says you must have broken into the guy’s apartment with Rich Little and set him up. I’m going to keep checking in at the StoneZone for the latest.

According to advance reports, President Bush will tomorrow invoke the specter of Vietnam in defense of his failed Iraq policy.

But isn’t this quite possibly the worst argument for his Iraq policy?

Going forty years on, it is not too much to say that virtually none of the predicted negative repercussions of our departure from Vietnam ever came to pass.

Asia didn’t go Communist. Our Asian allies didn’t abandon us. Rather, the Vietnamese began to fall out with her Communist allies. With the Cold War over, in strategic terms at least, it’s almost hard to remember what the whole fight was about. If anything, the clearest lesson of Vietnam would seem to be that there can be a vast hue and cry about the catastrophic effects of disengagement from a failed policy and it can turn out that none of them are true.

Even more interesting is another argument President Bush is poised to make: namely, that Vietnam is more than just an analogy. He will argue that the terrorist threat we face today is in some measure the result of our withdrawal from Vietnam, as it emboldened the terrorists to attack us.

The president will also make the argument that withdrawing from Vietnam emboldened today’s terrorists by compromising U.S. credibility, citing a quote from al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden that the American people would rise against the Iraq war the same way they rose against the war in Vietnam, according to the excerpts.

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a better example of President Bush’s comically inept strategic thinking. Actually, lack of strategic thinking. I’m sure you’ve noticed how, as the president’s policies go further and further down the drain, he more and more often cites the authority of Osama bin Laden as the rationale for his policies. In this case, we must stay in Iraq forever wasting money and lives and destroying our position in the world because if we don’t we’ll have proved Osama bin Laden right.

It’s like a very sad version of a sixty year old falling for that dingbat head fake ten year olds used to play when I was a kid in elementary school in which Kid A says he wants the football, Kid B says, ‘Fine, but if you take the football, you’re gay.’ And then Kid A stalks off hopelessly bamboozled and unable to parry this paralyzing riddle.

Apparently we have permanently ceded our foreign policy to the whim of Osama bin Laden’s taunts.

And finally there’s more.

“Whatever your position in that debate, one unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens, whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like ‘boat people,’ ‘re-education camps’ and ‘killing fields,’ ” the president will say.

The story of the ‘boat people’ is unquestionably tragic. And there’s little doubt that there are many Iraqis who will pay either with their lives or nationality for aiding us in various ways during our occupation of the country. But to govern our policy on this basis is simply to buy into a classic sunk cost fallacy. A far better — and really quite necessary — policy would be to give asylum to a lot of these people rather than continuing to get more of them into the same position in advance of our inevitable departure.

More concretely though, didn’t the killing fields happen in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge rather than Vietnam? So doesn’t that complicate the analogy a bit? And didn’t that genocide actually come to an end when the Communist Vietnamese invaded in 1979 and overthrow the Khmer Rouge regime? The Vietnamese Communists may have been no great shakes. But can we get through one of these boneheaded historical analogies while keeping at least some of the facts intact?

Please?

It must be sort of like Christmas in August for the Bush Administration. Department of Justice lawyers determine that a White House office that had been busily processing FOIA requests for the past six years is actually not subject to FOIA.

Senator Tim Johnson (D-SD) to make a public appearance next week, his first since his near-fatal brain hemorrhage this past December. That and other news in today’s Election Central Morning Roundup.