Obama, in an interview that aired this morning on Good Morning America:
This point is implicit in much of the current paranoid saber-rattling over the Middle East. But does John McCain really think that the threat posed by Iran is equal to that the United States faced from the Soviet Union — the world’s greatest land military power, with a massive strategic nuclear capacity that carried on a multi-decade ideological struggle with the US? In his speech this morning, McCain adds all the caveats that Iran is not a superpower. But at bottom he still seems to see that it is a sign of foreign policy naivite to say that the threat we face from Iran today pales in comparison to that we faced from the Soviets.
TPM Reader RCB mulls John McCain’s threat classification schema …
Seems like a “threat” in this sense is really a function of two variables: the potency of the enemy *and* the ability to defend against that enemy’s arsenal. (Potency – Defense = Threat.)
In that context, Obama is partially right. The Soviets had the ability to rain down warheads upon us and destroy multiple cities. However, we could counter with M.A.D., and at least we knew where the Soviet leader lived, so in the end, the potential danger was huge but the threat in terms of daily risk was significantly lower.
Meanwhile, from McCain’s point of view, Iran is part of a larger, amorphous network of Dangerous Brown People Who Want Us Dead. And many key aspects of our defense against that (non-proliferation, capturing Bin Laden, avoiding Iraq-style quagmire, etc.) are sorely lacking. So in this sense, McCain may truly believe that Iran is part of a more serious day-to-day threat.
Of course, that reality would be due in large part to profound failures in policy and judgment that McCain has endorsed for a few years, but I guess he’s hoping he can gloss over that with the tough talk. The Iranians and the Soviets could only wish(ed) they could use any weapon as effectively as the GOP has used fear over the past six years.
Breaking SurveyUSA poll of Oregon: Obama 55%, Clinton 42%.
Eric Alterman argues for the big bad “L” word in this week’s Book Club, which features his newest: Why We’re Liberals: A Political Handbook for Post-Bush America.
Liberalism is back in all but the name, he argues. So what’s wrong with the name?
Helping him to sort that out all week will be Joan McCarter of DailyKos, Digby of Hullabaloo, Brink Lindsey of the CATO Institute, and Ed Kilgore of The Democratic Strategist.
Hillary flack Howard Wolfson gets his correction from the New York Times.
The general election matchup between John McCain and Barack Obama received a symbolic champagne bottle smash against the hull last week when President Bush implicitly attacked Barack Obama’s foreign policy as appeasement during a speech in Jerusalem. Obama fired back, McCain jumped in, and the ship was off and sailing …
High-res version at Veracifier.com.
In case you missed it, I want to commend to your attention Jeffrey Goldberg’s article in the Sunday Times: “Israel’s ‘American Problem“. The premise will be a familiar one to anyone who’s thought seriously and sanely about Israel’s future and America’s relationship with Israel. The breadth of acceptable opinion about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is vastly greater in Israel than it is in the United States. Indeed, as Goldberg suggests, if Prime Minister Olmert and Defense Minister Barak were running for president in the US, they might not be deemed sufficiently pro-Israel to be acceptable in the American mainstream.
Here’s one memorable passage in which Goldberg quotes Joshua Katzen of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), which one might fairly describe as a think tank which advocates on behalf extremist American Jews, a good number of whom found their way into the Bush administration (here’s a good article on the group by Jason Vest who’s reported on them extensively).
From Goldberg’s article …
One leader, Joshua Katzen, of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, told me, “I think that Israelis don’t have the big view of global jihad that American Jews do, because Israelis are caught up in their daily emergencies.” When I asked him how his Israeli friends responded to this, he answered: “They say, ‘When your son has to fight, you can have an opinion.’ But I tell them that it is precisely because your son has to fight that you have a harder time seeing the larger picture.”
I won’t take the time to recapitulate the whole article. But you should read it because it covers a basic reality — by conflating being pro-Israel with supporting the continued colonization of the West Bank, many of Israel’s ‘friends’ in the US are placing Israel in great danger and doing no favor to the United States either.
EPA Administrator Stephen “Stonewall” Johnson testifies on the Hill today, but not before Rep. Henry Waxman launched a broadside at him, alleging the White House persuaded Johnson to change his mind and overrule staff in refusing a waiver for California to regulate vehicle greenhouse gas emissions.