User Profile: Sean Richardson

U.S. and Russian relations are at their lowest point since the fall of the Berlin Wall due to an inexplicable confrontation the U.S. provoked against the one country in the world that can actually destroy us against a phantom threat by the Iranians that was a best a decade away.  Kristina Vanden Heuvel lays bare the sheer mindlessness of our foreign policy. 

The U.S. plan to base an ABM system in the Czech Republic and Poland allegedly aimed to target rogue missiles from Iran or North Korea provoked an enraged response from the highest levels of the Russian government and military and overt threats to target nuclear weapons at european countries that fall under the NATO umbrella. 

In as cunning an act of diplomatic stagecraft since Reagan said "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall", Putin called Bush's bluff and offered to cooperate on a missile defense system based in Azerbaijan.  Bush having crowed about how much he wanted to let the Russians have transparencies on a system based in Eastern Europe, could hardly complaining when Putin offered to do just that, just in a different and legally sovereign location which would still allow any interceptors the opportunity to deflect ballistic weapons from Iran.   Even Stephen Hadley had to admit the administration will take the proposal under serious consideration, lest the U.S. lose any of the remaining credibility it has left with respect to international security matters. 

This is a clear win, for Russia, who will continue to do business with Iran while having veto power over a  joint U.S./Russia interceptor missile design meant to intercept their own technology all the while basing the worthless interceptor in a region over which you have effective control and from which geographically, none of Russia's missiles could be intercepted by the 'jointly developed system.'. 

In the first known attack of its kind on a state-sponsored level, The Guardian is reporting that NATO is accusing Russia of launching a massive cyberattack on Estonia.  Relations between Russia and Estonia have deteriorated badly over the past month, sparked by the removal of a memorial to Russian soldiers  in Tallin. 

Although NATO is unable to prove the direct involvement of Russia's military/security services and 'cyberwar' is not technically a "clear military action" that compels NATO to act in self-defence of a member state, the alliance considers this a deadly serious matter, as it goes to the heart of the operational security of NATO's command and control systems.  NATO's top cyberwarfare specialists have been sent into action.

Estonia is perhaps the world's most wired country, making its government and businesses especially vulnerable to cyberattacks.

Russia, through its ambassador in Brussels, denies any involvement in the cyberattacks.  The Estonian defence minister is calling on NATO to broaden it's definition of "military action".  Given Russia's vast increase in wealth and national self-confidence due to the success of its energy industry, this is an unwelcome development for Western Europe and the U.S.

In a preview of what will surely be a major issue in the 2008 Presidential election, the British Medical Association for the first time will admit that certain healthcare procedures must be rationed.  The Guardian touts this as "a major report that will embarrass the government", and that "Primary care trusts, the local NHS organisations that commission and pay for care from hospitals on behalf of patients, are increasingly rejecting requests to pay for procedures or drugs because they are not perceived to be the best use of funds."

What sort of experimental and wasteful procedures won't be covered by Britain's National Health Service?  "Some PCTs have been bitterly criticised for refusing to pay for expensive new cancer drugs; treatment to prevent older people going blind through age-related eye degeneration and operations to help obese patients lose weight through stomach-stapling."  OK.  While anyone with cancer or their loved one's will surely want to try any treatment that may have any chance of saving a cancer patient, and all of us can sympathize or empathize with them, only the most callous would deny basic treatment to children so that the obese can shop at Harvey Nicks.  And while no one wants to go blind, our eyes do degenerate with age.

"The BMA proposes the drawing up of a new patients' charter specifying those health services to which every citizen across England should be entitled, regardless of the local health authority's financial situation. They also want to see a second list of all the treatments which the sick will get only if their primary care trust has the money, and if doctors decide they are clinically worthwhile."  Terrific.  This is what should have been done long ago rather than pretend that disparities didn't exist in the British healthcare system. 

Admittedly, difficult choices will have to be made.  My sister lives in London, an area which is now stunningly prosperous, even to a well-off New Yorker, and her infant son has a serious (though common and easily treatable) heart ailment.  I accompanied her to my nephew's non-NHS (read 'private') pediatric cardiologist located in a posh townhouse for a routine 10 minute checkup.  The bill, payable immediately, was 500 pounds, about $1000.  Should a less prosperous family not be entitled to the treatment of my nephew on the government's dime?  Or should five other families not get basic care for their children?

Unless the 2008 Presidential candidates are willing to address these issues honestly and not pander to American voters, another generation will pass before we will be able to ensure that all of us receive a reasonable level of healthcare services.  Choices will have to be made, but unintended consequences can be mitigated by the ingenuity of American financiers (read 'insurance companies'). 

The fact that Barack Obama is now under the protection of the Secret Service, nearly a year earlier than any other candidate Presidential candidate in our history (except HRC, who will remain under the protection of the SS as long as she is married to Bill Clinton) says a great deal about where we are at as a society.  Howard Fineman confesses the collective guilt and relief of mainstream white journalists attending the first Republican Presidential debate in Simi Valley when he wrote "I talked to my fellow reporters here about this last night, and they were uniformly relieved. So was I."

Anyone following even mainstream online blogs like Politico.com can see the naked hostility and racism directed Obama's way, if not direct threats to his life.  I don't read white supremacist blogs and sites but I can only imagine what is being said.  You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to believe that one or more people, who are not stupid enough to post hostile messages on the web, may be actively plotting his demise.

By all accounts, Obama's appearances have generated such large crowds that he would be safer walking through Baghdad with a target on his back.  Hiring Blackwater as his praetorian guard would be unthinkable politically for Obama.  The damage to America's already horrendous image overseas would be incalculable if any harm were to come to Obama.  Michael Chertoff and the Department of Homeland Security, who now run the SS, surely didn't need to be reminded of this and the fact that any attempted or successful assassination would make the election of a Democrat all but inevitable in 2008.  This is not to say that keeping Obama safe so that HRC can be eviscerated by the GOP is part of the Republican strategy for 2008, but to ignore this reality would be naive.

Fineman and the liberal media want to keep hope alive and not have a replay of 1968 when we lost MLK and RFK.  Fineman muses that "there is an innocence, almost a naiveté, to Obama and his campaign."  This is of course ludicrous - naive and innocent men do not run for President.  More accurately, the administration doesn't need a martyr on its hands after botching Saddam's execution.     

Watching George Tenet pitching his new book At The Center Of The Storm on 60 Minutes was a nauseating experience.  Not being content with having failed to prevent the 9/11 attacks or to capture or kill Osama Bin Laden and his top deputies prior to 9/11, Tenet now insists that he never really believed in the case for going to war with Iraq and was bullied by Cheney et al. 

In a letter to Tenet signed by six former CIA officers, he is rightly exorciated for attempting to burnish his reputation and to cash in on his failures.  Calling him "a grotesque mixture of incompetence and sycophancy shielded by a genial personality", the former CIA officers charge that "By your silence you helped build the case for war. You betrayed the CIA officers who collected the intelligence that made it clear that Saddam did not pose an imminent threat. You betrayed the analysts who tried to withstand the pressure applied by Cheney and Rumsfeld. Most importantly and tragically, you failed to meet your obligations to the people of the United States. Instead of resigning in protest, when it could have made a difference in the public debate, you remained silent and allowed the Bush Administration to cite your participation in these deliberations to justify their decision to go to war. Your silence contributed to the willingness of the public to support the disastrous war in Iraq, which has killed more than 3300 Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis."

Where was this man's sense of duty to the American people?  At least Colin Powell, although equally culpable for making the case for the Iraq War, was asking hard questions of Tenet.  Powell insisted that Tenet sit behind him as he made the case for invading Iraq to the U.N. and Tenet did so.  More than any other single piece of evidence or speech made by any American official, including President Bush's infamous State of the Union address, the American people knew and trusted Colin Powell, who quite obviously realizes that he sold his soul in a misplaced sense of duty to the Commander in Chief leftover from his service in the Pentagon. 

Unlike Powell, who was obviously shut out of day to day foreign policy making despite having the title of Secretary of State, Tenet spoke to Bush every morning about the threats to American security.  While both men should have resigned in protest rather than enable Bush's war, only Tenet could have exerted strong back channel pressure in Congress with his briefings to the intelligence committees.  Had he raised any doubt in private about the intelligence that Congress was spoon fed by the neocon's, we may very well have avoided one of the worst foreign policy and military debacles in our history.

Barack screwed up the foreign policy and terrorism questions big time.  Hopefully it won't happen again or he will soon lose ground to Edwards. Despite his apparently formidable courtroom skills, Edwards still hasn't done well in any televised debates and told an idiotic story about how his dad couldn't pay the bill for a sunday lunch after church in response to a question about his $400 haircuts and huge house.  He should have said 'I'm rich beotch and I want you to be rich too.'

Brian Williams went so far as to say to Edwards that he could probably afford a $4000 haircut, making it obvious that he needed to prove his populist bona fides and he didn't do it for me.  No Democratic president since FDR has come from obvious family wealth.  Obama's Hyde Park $1.7m townhouse and HRC's relatively modest home in Westchester (around $2m) make them seem parsimonious by comparison in this era when men like Bloomberg and Corzine have bought their way to high office with their own personal money. 

HRC made the least mistakes during the debate amongst the top three.  She won't lose ground in the polls.

Amongst the 3rd tier, Dodd seemed the most presidential and benefited most from this event.  You can see this man in the Oval Office if there some odd alignment of the planets.  Biden is obviously running for Secretary of State.  Richardson (no relation), kept himself the front runner for VP with his strident defense of gun ownership and frank admission that he was the last to call for Gonzalez's resignation because he was a fellow Hispanic and a friend and wanted to give him an opportunity to defend himself one last time.  The classic ticket balancer. 

Richardson's answer on the Cuba issue was awful.  He had the opportunity to go right of the Republicans as a pro-business Hispanic-American and say 'all of our Western allies are already doing business with them and we are hurting ourselves because an irrational half-century hatred of the ruler of a small country who has had no ability to attack us militarily for decades.'  Instead he said something incomprehensible. Someone please remind him that Cuban-American's don't hold the margin of victory in Florida anymore.

We American's seem to buy a lot of goods made in China and they hold enough of our treasury debt to dictate Federal Reserve policy. Perhaps this is why we choose to pick on Cuba.

Kucinich was Kuchinich and the guy from Alaska provided comic relief.

I vividly recall the U.S. Marine barracks bombing of 1983.  Dozens of college freshmen stared slack jawed at the carnage displayed on the sole television on our floor in the dormitory lounge.  All of us were sickened by the sheer scale of the carnage, carried out with the equivalent of 12,000 pounds of TNT, which is thought to be the largest non-nuclear explosion ever detonated.  241 American servicemen died, along with 58 French soldiers. 

I consider this moment to be the time when the reality of Islamic terrorism entered the collective American conscience.  The Munich Olympics massacre in 1972, was obviously the first wake-up call, but no Americans were involved and the killings, while tragic for Israel, were small in scale.

The Secretary of Defense in 1983 was of course Caspar Weinberger.  In a Frontline interview from late September of 2001, Weinberger lays out his thoughts on the confronting terrorism.  It makes for very sobering reading nearly six years later. 

"A buffer force is fine if you insert it between two warring factions that have agreed there should be a buffer force in there. If you have it between two warring factions that have not agreed, and there had not been an agreement, no matter how much people talked about it, for the forces to pull back so that the buffer force would be in very grave peril. It's worse because the buffer force is always lightly armed, has very vague rules of engagement, and it is not able, really, to defend itself. And so unless you have full agreement of all sides, you shouldn't do it."

"Very, very vividly. ... The loss of life [of] Marines was horrible to contemplate. The fact that I had been warning against this very thing didn't give me any slight satisfaction, I can assure of that. It was terrible to be proven right under such horrible circumstances. They should have been pulled out earlier. They were pulled out later.  I suggested many times that, to answer these people that were worried about Marines cutting and running and all that nonsense, to put them on ships, their normal environment. These Marine amphibious brigades were on their own ship, to bring them back and pull them out of this dangerous bulls-eye and put them on our ships where they could be protected until they were really needed for something useful, rather than just sitting on an airport."

"Lessons learned is that if you're gong to do this, you're going to insert your troops, they have to have a mission. They have to have the arms and the equipment, and they have to have a goal that can be fulfilled. It led later to all the so-called Weinberger Doctrine, or whatever you want to call it, to the effect that: you have to have a mission; you have to know what you want to do; you have to use force as a last resort after everything else has failed; that when you use it, you have to use it at overwhelming strength, and win your objective and get out ... When you simply think the presence of American troops, no matter how wild the environment is or what's happening all around is going to have any effect, the only effect it's going to have is to risk the lives of the American troops. So I hope that was the lesson that was learned at Beirut. It was learned at terrible cost."

His prescience with respect to retaliating against those responsible for terrorist acts is stunning.  With respect to the aftermath of the bombing of a Berlin disco in 1986:

"Well, the decision to do it had been made months ago. The question was when it was to be executed. And it was to be executed after we had identified with considerable certainty the targets and the country and the people who were responsible for the terrorist acts. People who had harbored them, people who had trained them, people who had paid for them, people who had supported them -- and that was all Libya. When that was established beyond any question, then we unleashed the attack.  There was no debate as to whether or not we should attack. It was a question of when and how, and what should be the target, and there wasn't any debate about that. The target should be the training camps, the leadership, and the other targets associated with the Libyan support of terrorists."

That Saddam Hussein or any faction of the Iraqi military or intelligence apparatus was not responsible for 9/11 is beyond the debate of reasonable people.  The theory that Saddam was planning to use weapons of mass destruction against us or our allies is also equally ludicrous.  We of course looked the other way when he used them against his own people and Iran in the Iran-Iraq War when we were his most enthusiastic enabler.

I was no fan of Secretary Weinberger or President Reagan, but when you're right, you're right.

Barack Obama, in addition to moving even with HRC in the polls, or at worst now only five points behind, depending on who you believe, showed that he can cross party lines with one of Bush's former "Ranger" fundraisers and the Deputy Chairman of the Federal Board of Reserve in Chicago.  John Canning has given the maximum $4600 campaign contribution to Obama.  Of the Republican party, Mr. Channing says:

"It's become a party that's taken Neanderthal positions on things like stem-cell research and global warming,'' Canning, who was appointed to the Fed post in 2004, said in an interview. ``I no longer find myself on the same page.'' 

"You know when they say someone's experienced, if that means they've spent a long time in Washington, I don't know if that's a pretty good deal,'' he said. ``He's the strongest candidate in the entire field from both parties.''"I've probably veered away from the conservative, Republican agenda significantly,'' said Canning, chairman of Chicago-based Madison Dearborn Partners LLC, one of the 20 biggest U.S. private-equity firms.Because of his role at the Chicago Fed, Canning said he can't raise money for Obama, 45. "He has my emotional support,'' he said.

Can you imagine any Republican, current or former, saying the same thing about HRC, or John Edwards.  Of course, in today's political spectrum, Canning is more of a "libertarian" or "Rockefeller" Republican than the evangelist dominated GOP of today.  I think that what used to be called a "libertarian" is now an "independent".  If Obama can get prominent "independents" to give him the maximum campaign contribution that current law allows, then he is not a cypher or flash in the pan. 

More importantly, Obama hasn't had to resort to using his spouse to shore up support or raise money.  HRC certainly knows this.  Here's a prediction - if HRC doesn't have more than  35% of state delegates locked up when the 2008 Convention opens - she will bow out and endorse Obama, with Bill weighing in for good measure, and cut a deal for Richardson to be VP, rather than face a likely defeat at a brokered convention.  

In what is surely not the last of the revelations over just how poorly the Bush Administration has treated military veterans and their families, the Washington Post reported today that the Veterans Administration, after more than a decade of lawsuits and seeking to avoid further scrutiny of its incompetence after the Walter Reed scandal, has agreed to allow the Wiccan symbol to be displayed on tombstones at Arlington National Cemetery and other national burial grounds: 

"The Department of Veterans Affairs previously had given veterans a choice of 38 religious symbols, including numerous forms of the Christian cross, as well as the Jewish Star of David, the Muslim crescent, the Buddhist wheel and an atomic symbol for atheism."  

Where to begin?  With the intrusion of the government on the constitutional protection of religious practice or with the fact that the VA actually took the time to amass a list of approved symbols? Why not a swastika?  A good place to start is at the top:

"During his first campaign for president, then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush told ABC's "Good Morning America" in 1999 that he was opposed to Wiccan soldiers practicing their faith at Fort Hood, Tex. "I don't think witchcraft is a religion, and I wish the military would take another look at this and decide against it," he said."

To parse this statement is an exercise in deep frustration and anger.   Illegality aside, why does the President care what our brave volunteer soldiers do or do not do with respect to religious practice?  Unless they were engaging in human sacrifice on the military base, they are free to practice any religion, or perhaps more importantly, none. 

Criticizing Bush's judgment is too easy.  But isn't there anyone in the VA who cared enough about the fallen soldiers and their grieving families to not bureaucratize their choice of gravestone inscription?  I am sure this will be great for recruiting volunteers for the endless War on Terror.

I came across this piece in the Politico by Roger Simon entitled "Questions That Killed a Candidates Career" which reminded me that the presidential debate season gets underway in a few weeks.  Simon takes us back a generation to a debate between George H.W. Bush v. Dukakis in 1988.  A time devoid of blogs and routine internet use.  It is hard to think of a more Northeastern Wasp Republican than GHWB.  Born to wealth and unfettered access to the other families who ran this country, he was a loyal soldier at a time when Nixon and Watergate had thrown the party into a downslide at least as serious as the Iraq War, Katrina, Abramowitz, Gonzalez, et al.  Warm and fuzzy he was not. 

Dukakis, a technocrat governor of Massachussetts, had a solid shot at the general election after eight years of a Reagan and George H.W. Bush administration.  His hopes to be President evaporated as soon as he revealed that he valued intellectual principle over primal revenge.  Bernard Shaw, the CNN moderator, due to network and campaign agreed rules, would only get one question before the candidates were allowed to run the debate.  Mr. Shaw's question of whether Dukakis's opposition to capital punishment would survive the rape and murder of his wife and Dukakis' spineless retort sealed the election of Bush I.

Shortly thereafter, the Federalist Society of Columbia Law School (I am not and have never been a member of the Federalist Society) posted crude photocopied pictures of Dukakis' head (he was of Greek descent) crafted onto the body of a Greek diner cook throughout the law school.  In the days before Photoshop, where many thousands of people could have crafted any perfect image they desired, this was an obvious act of political parody and protected speech which, after Dukakis' infamous tank ride and debate performance was well deserved and the photochop was hilarious. The PC police besieged the Law School and the Federalist Society with protests to remove the photos and demand an apology and they were thankfully rebuffed on the grounds of free speech. 

Simon asks us to think of the one question you would ask a Presidential candidate if given the opportunity.  One worthy of Bernard Shaw that will cut to the core of a candidates values.  If AZers came us with list distilled down to a few possible questions and pressed the networks running the debates, we could actually get some of these questions asked. 

Don't ask about tax policy ('will you raise taxes to pay for your program to protect..') or free trade ('do you support U.S. labor standards being applied to any goods sold in this country ...') but cut to the quick.