A Question for Congressman Hines

May 26:  When I read a certain front-page article in the New York Times on Friday, my mind immediately hurled itself, and much of the rest of me with it, back to Poland in 1772. I can’t help it; my mind does that sometimes, since, I guess, that’s where my forebears were living at the time. But I can explain it, at least to some extent. Please bear with.

The article, by Eric Lipton and Ben Protess, is entitled in full, in that typical cascade of headlines often used these days: “Banks’ Lobbyists Help in Drafting of Bills on Finance: Move to Soften Rules: Wall St. Finding Capital a Friendlier Place—It Donates More.” It shows how Citibank is essentially writing legislation, word for word, that affects its own interests, and it gets to do this by suborning Congress with campaign donations.

There is nothing new here, of course, except the details of yet another outrageous example. My TAI ebook, Broken: American Political Dysfunction and What to Do About It, tells the same general story and gives earlier examples—as have for years now books by Robert Kaiser, Joe Klein, Kevin Philips, Dylan Ratigan and many others. Here, for example, is an excerpt from Broken:

[M]oney doesn’t just buy votes these days; it buys the texts of laws and regs. Corporate lobbyists actually provide congressional staff with specific language and often lots of it, and sometimes these days they do it while literally sitting in House and Senate office buildings, sometimes as lobbyists and some- times as former lobbyists become Capitol Hill staffers. Liz Fowler, a former head lobbyist for WellPoint and a staffer for Senator Max Baucus, wrote the basic draft of the Obamacare bill. Julie Chon, a former J.P. Morgan analyst, wrote large chunks of the Dodd-Frank banking legislation while working for Senator Dodd.

My favorite example, from November 2009, I describe in Broken as follows:

. . . Genentech lobbyists had provided health care policy talking points to the staffs of several House members that made their way verbatim into the congressional record via the identical official statements of a clutch of Representatives. Genentech had earlier poured many dollars into these Representatives’ campaign coffers. But Evan L. Morris, head of Genentech’s Washington office, claimed (without anyone prodding him to do so), “There was no connection between the contributions and the statements.” Heaped on this insult to everyone’s intelligence, another lobbyist commented, “This happens all the time. There’s nothing nefarious about it.”

One is tempted to just chalk up the NYT article as another typical MSP BFO (that’s “mainstream press blinding flash of the obvious”, for those not yet inducted into the wonderful world of Washington acronymphomania—defined as the promiscuous use of acronyms, of course), in the same class as recent headlines warning, months after it had become obvious to anyone paying attention, that the integrity of the Syrian state is at risk because of its civil war, or that the Syrian civil war might have some impact on communal relations in Iraq, and so on and on. One gets used to this, even though, in the best of all possible worlds (one of which existed as recently as two decades ago as far as the press is concerned) one should not have to.

That said, this NYT article is worth the time to read not just for the details it provides, but for two other reasons as well. One is that it forces us to focus on the financialization of the economy over the past quarter century—and I probably spent too little time in Broken talking about this, though many others (Simon Johnson to name but one) with more expertise and experience in this area than me have done so. When all the sports arenas and baseball stadiums started to get named after banks, I knew intuitively that something very bad was happening, but I didn’t understand what exactly it was until recently. The second reason for reading the NYT article concerns one really and truly terrific quotation—of which more below.

Now, I did point out in Broken that we in the United States don’t have a national bank, as such, as most other liberal democracies do; the Fed is composed of bankers (and only from the larger banks) who quite naturally have their own interests at heart. This arrangement is part of the original compromise that created the Federal Reserve System in 1913. So when people blame Ben Bernanke for doing dumb or merely inexplicable things, they often forget that the avaricious cats he’s trying to herd have motives he cannot detach from them. Low interest rates and lots of quantitative easing have created a situation in which the banks can arbitrage interest rates to make a lot of risk-free cash, which is exactly what they’re doing. The point? There are two.

First, big banks no longer have interests that align with the best interests of the economy in general, but they’re so powerful that they can nevertheless get their way on key economic policy issues. And second, to get back to the NYT article, the big banks have now come to dominate the plutocracy in the United States, writing their own laws and regs. That has major implications for corporate investment strategies, thus for the rate of innovation in the economy, for the capacity of the economy to generate jobs, for the trade balance and the strength of the dollar, and more besides.

We definitely have a fox-guarding-hen-house kind of problem here, big time, but Congress will do nothing about it because of all the money Wall Street gives them, and, peeling back the onion a few layers, that’s because they need enormous and growing sums of money for campaigning, and that in turn is because of the role of TV ads in contemporary American electoral politics, recently made worse by the opacity bequeathed by Citizens United—as vividly illustrated in the 2012 elections. And that is why the first of the ten proposals in Broken zeroes in on getting a handle on the role of TV in American campaign financing.

Amazingly, there are still academics out there who insist that TV really isn’t that important in American politics, and that all the money spent on ads isn’t really very important either; but I have noticed that none of these academics seem to live here in Washington. You can bloody well smell what’s going on, just like, when I was a kid, you could smell the Potomac River from ten miles away. Ohio and Kansas (I’ve been to both places recently) smell entirely different. The money and the TVcentric character of the spending are important in electoral outcomes, but they’re even more important to the conversations that take place before anyone even votes—which is why the major corporations and Wall Street give money to both sides. They are equal opportunity suborners.

Now that great quote.  Here is how the NYT quotes Jim Hines, a third-term Democratic Congressman from Connecticut:

I won’t dispute for one second the problems of a system that demands immense amounts of fundraisers by its legislators. It’s appalling, it’s disgusting, it’s wasteful, and it opens the possibility of conflicts of interest and corruption. It’s unfortunately the world we live in.

Hines, a member of the House Financial Services Committee and a former Goldman Sachs banker, is one of the top recipients of Wall Street money. He lives in this appalling, disgusting, wasteful, corrupt world because he and his colleagues, Democratic and Republican alike, abet it. If this is such an “unfortunate” world, why does Hines contribute to it? Why doesn’t he instead try to contribute to its reform (there’s zero sign of his interest in so doing)? Does this seemingly masochistic congressman need a psychiatrist, or a jailer?

Now back to 1772 and all that (the historically aware among you will have long since known where I’m going with this). On the occasion of the First Partition of Poland, Frederick II of Prussia remarked famously of Hapsburg archduchess Maria Theresa that, as it has come down to us in the abbreviated form of historical folklore, “She wept, but she took.” As Norman Davies describes the matter (on page 390) in his 2005 bookGod’s Playground, it was even better (if not quite as succinct) than that. Referring to Catherine of Russia and himself, Frederick said (in French, and Davies quotes in French when he simply must):

Maria Theresa . . . was devout and anxious. When the First Partition was eventually completed, Frederick remarked: “The Empress Catherine and I are simple brigands. But I wonder how the Queen-Empress managed to square her confessor. . . . Elle pleurait quand elle prenait; et plus elle pleuraid, plus elle prenait.”

And so, Congressman Hines, let me understand you in historical context: You weep, but you take, and the more you weep, the more you take. Given your lacrymose remark to the New York Times, one shutters to imagine what is now about to get took…. And you do this because your colleagues—the great Catherines and Fredericks among your Capitol Hill company—force you to do it?  You are a co-conspirator, one of several hundred at the least, in the accelerating partition of American democracy, then.  Do I have that about right?

Benghazigate: Missing Another Point

May 23, 2013

Yesterday’s Washington Post carried a very scary front-page article, and no, I am not referring to the coverage of the Oklahoma twister. I refer to the article above the fold, left, signed by Scott Wilson and Karen deYoung entitled “Petraeus at heart of Benghazi Dispute.” The article supplies much more detail about the origins of the now infamous “talking points”, a topic I have recently mentioned twice in this space (most recently May 17, before that May 8). The article is scary for at least two reasons, which I will discuss in just a moment. But first let’s digest the gist of the news from this article.

If what you read in the newspaper can be believed—and of course it often can’t, depending on the journalists’ sources, the editors’ purposes and much else besides (of which more below)—the origins of the talking points issued from a request from chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence to then-CIA Director David Petraeus to provide the minimum necessary to make sure that committee members did not inadvertently reveal classified material upon discussing the Benghazi events in committee. Petraeus did far more than the minimum necessary, the article shows, presumably to frame what had happened in Benghazi three days before in such a way that the CIA-heavy nature of the facility that was attacked, and the CIA’s own obviously inadequate responsibility for protecting that facility, would not be divulged.  So we’re talking here about a standard bureaucratic exercise in posterior protection.

According to the Washington Post article, however, Petraeus’s memo “included early classified information about who might be responsible for the attack and an account of prior CIA warnings—information that put Petraeus at odds with the State Department, the FBI and senior officials within his own agency.” The article reveals that it was the CIA, in the person of Petraeus, who first asserted that the now infamous anti-Islamic video indeed played a role in sparking spontaneous demonstrations in Cairo and Benghazi that later led to the attack. This is real news (if it’s true).

The article goes on to say that, “The only government entity that did not object to the detailed talking points produced with Petraeus’s input was the White House, which played the role of mediator in the bureaucratic fight that at various points included the CIA’s top lawyer and the agency’s deputy director expressing opposition to what the director wanted.”

The article even suggests why other parties objected. The FBI objected because it worried that mention of Ansar al-Sharia might jeopardize a legal case should the perpetrators ever be apprehended and made to stand some kind of trial. The CIA’s top lawyer, Stephen W. Preston, objected presumably for the same reason. The State Department objected because it did not want it known that the CIA had warned it about potential terror attacks on its facilities in North Africa, because that would make it look like the State Department had irresponsibly ignored or downplayed those warnings. This is ironic, of course, because as the Pickering investigation showed, the State Department had been irresponsible about not heeding CIA warnings, even though it was not actually a State Department building that was attacked.

Now why is this scary?

First, it’s clear from the article—and you need to read it yourself to get the full flavor—that a raft of very sensitive classified emails was leaked to theWashington Post. Good for the reporters as investigative journalists, but it’s not good when stuff this detailed ends up in the newspaper. It tends to seriously chill Interagency communications with multiple ice cubes of distrust, among other things. Note, too, that the lawyers’ concerns about mentioning Ansar al-Sharia in the memo really only make sense if they assumed that the memo would be leaked or subpoened one day—how else could it affect a prospective trial?—neither of which, as a matter of course, ought to happen.

I am not going to speculate about whose interests are served by the release of material harmful to the CIA, or even go so far as to guess out loud which part of the government would be most likely to have access in a single file to the communications of at least three different Executive Branch agencies—you yourself, dear reader, really should be able to guess by now. Don’t bother, because we know: The lead editorial in today’s New York Times, “The CIA’s Part in Benghazi”, claims that the White House released all this stuff “under pressure.” But it doesn’t say pressure from whom, why the pressure was applied, or why the White House knuckled under to it. What horsetwaddle. These kinds of leaks are very harmful cumulatively, and they need to stop. But if the White House is doing or condoning the leaking, they are very likely not to stop. That’s sort of scary, and would be scarier still were most of us not already so jaded in the face of this sort of thing.

High-level leaking carries the additional danger that it removes inhibitions against lower-level leaking. The Justice Department may indict Fox News reporter James Rosen for conspiring with a State Department expert on Korea to leak classified information, but reporters would have no reason to engage in such behavior if the middle echelons of government were not so prone to leak stuff, in many cases in the belief, not entirely unwarranted, that “everybody does it”, very much including White House staffers. Might it not be perhaps a little hypocritical for the Justice Department to focus on Rosen when the White House is dumping tons of sensitive material into the public domain? All that is scary, too.

Second, and far more important, nowhere in this article is there any indication that anyone, especially in the White House, had any objection to the CIA engaging in what can only be described as a politically sensitive drafting of language. If everyone was working under the assumption that only the House Select Committee would see the “talking points”, and that they would not be used as a basis for public statements by the State Department or the White House, than this is not a huge issue. And it could well be that Petraeus understood the matter exactly that way. But for the White House and the State Department to then use that material to speak publicly, and do so on a politically sensitive, potentially embarrassing matter just a few weeks before a presidential election, violates in every possible way the apolitical mandate of the intelligence community.

The CIA and the other parts of the intelligence community are supposed to serve up analytical judgments to their various clients; they are never supposed to get involved with either the making of political judgments or certainly with the dark arts of spinning their political effects. So let’s now go back to a sentence from the Washington Post article quoted above: “The only government entity that did not object to the detailed talking points produced with Petraeus’s input was the White House. . .”; but that’s the “government entity” that most assuredly should have objected to such talking points being used for purposes of public briefings.

With almost no exception in the torrent of commentary about Benghazigate, so-called, this point has gone unmentioned. Now, to me at least, that’s really scary. Case in point: Today’s aforementioned New York Times editorial, windy as it is, doesn’t even raise this key question, probably because, of all the actors in this drama, the White House, not the CIA, actually comes out looking worst for the wear.

Afterwords

It’s no fun blogging at moving targets.

Since I tried on May 8 to make the simple point that Gregory Hicks’s testimony was being used for partisan purposes, and hence deflected attention from the Obama Administration’s real, seminal errors on Libya—which date to March 2011, not September 2012—some interesting developments have taken place. 

It is now clear, for example, that at the root of the errors made last September was a mostly typical Interagency dysfunction. The Benghazi consulate facility, where Ambassador Stevens happened to be at the wrong time, was a CIA operation in the main. We now know a lot more about the migration of the infamous “talking points” from CIA to State to Susan Rice’s mouth at the UN delegation up in Turtle Bay. Anyone who has ever been either a producer or user of intelligence products can imagine how anything written by a blabbermouthing State Department would be denatured to near nothingness by a CIA trying, naturally and habitually, to say as little as possible.

This is a neat flip on the old adage that a diplomat is someone who thinks twice about saying nothing. These days generally, and in this case for sure, our diplomats (certainly not to exclude Ambassador Rice) have tended to babble unnecessarily, and it’s the intel types who now best fit the old description.

My main point in that May 8 post still stands, however—and I emphatically stand by it.

I then tried on May 10 to get beneath Russian motives for finally saying “yes” to a Syria peace parley, and in the process I suggested that the current Secretary of State is perhaps the most naïve person to occupy that office since Frank Kellogg. And no sooner did that post go up that word began to spread of an impending S-300 surface-to-air missile supply from Russia to Syria.

Now, in the post, I said that Putin making Kerry wait for three hours before seeing him was a kind of body language suggesting that the former was deep in a process of snookering the latter.  I tried to discern what form the snookering might take: stall tactic and/or strategic rakeoff.  The S-300 “announcement”, let loose to leak before Kerry’s seat in Moscow had even cooled off, deepens the impression. It’s a little like kicking someone in the ass as they’re headed out the door. Then the timing of the ship missile delivery. Then following within a day by the way the Russians orchestrated the Ryan Fogel expulsion. And now the gathering of 11 Russian warships in the Med, the first demonstration exercise of its kind since 1992. 

So since May 10 we have mounting evidence that Obama and Kerry are reading a Rocky and Bulwinkle script while Boris and Natasha are picking their pockets.Unlike the original, however, it’s not funny.

Three Hard Pieces

May 7, 2013:

It’s been some time since I’ve commented on matters Middle Eastern and Asia Minored in this space, though I have written of other things, from the 70^th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising to the Boston Marathon terror incident. It’s not that nothing has been happening in the region—on the contrary—but most of it has been utterly predictable, so much so that it tempts “I-told-you-so” references back to earlier posts.

So things get worse in Egypt and now some observers are beginning to realize that the freefalling economy is more likely to touch off disaster than the antics of high politics in Cairo. Check.

So Iraq is falling fast, once again, into sectarian violence, in part because of the demonstration effect across the border in Syria, in part because Prime Minister Maliki lacks—how shall we put it?—certain democratic habits of the heart. Check.

So the situation in Afghanistan gets ever worse, but the new ISAF commander, General Joseph F. Dunford, Jr., waxes optimistic in interviews for the press. That’s his job, so he may even believe what he’s saying. Check.

So the antipathy between Sunni and Shi’a radicals in and around the Syrian cauldron is growing rapidly, lately manifested in the battle of the shrines—wherein Sunnis destroy Shi’a holy sites (most recently one not too far from Damascus) and proudly disinter centuries-dead bodies (or the dust thought to have once been bodies), and the Iranian regime threatens holy retaliation, which goads the Sunnis toward the next shrine, and so on. The second Battle of Karbala is drawing ever closer, as I have said, so check.

The “I-told-you-so” tense, I’ll admit, does amuse me to one degree or another, and it reduces my proneness to shift into curmudgeon mode. But after a certain point it gets unseemly, since no one likes the sight of solipsistic back-patting. So I have avoided it.

Over the past few days, however, some genuinely new and interesting developments have popped into view, even if overlaid on recognizable (if neuralgic) themes. And, as usual, the standard mainstream media accounts—while helpful in delivering some of the facts—usually don’t get readers very far toward understanding what’s actually happening.  So let me meander through the three main headline-grabbing items, in this order: Israeli airstrikes against newly delivered Hizballah arms supplies in Syria; Benghazigate; and the prospect, announced yesterday, of a Russo-American conference on Syria. In this meander we thus will encounter, in turn, a tale of lesser evils, a descent into venal surreality, and a complicated prospective diplomatic mugging.

The Israeli Strikes

This past weekend’s Israeli air strikes on newly delivered munitions meant for Hizballah were nothing new. But these strikes were a little more telegenic, and larger-living politically, than earlier ones. What’s going on?  Almost too much to explain simply.

Senior Israeli officials do not relish ordering such attacks. They call attention to Israel when what is going on in Syria (and elsewhere in the region anywhere east of Ramallah and south of Gaza City) really has pretty much nothing to do with Israel. That attention whets the addled diplomatic imaginations of people like John Kerry and other “linkers”, who still think, despite all the evidence, that Israel and Jews and the whole Jewcentric shebang of related influences are somehow central to every problem in and beyond the region. Of course they’re not (not that they’re completely irrelevant either…..it’s not simple, as I warned).

Such attacks also raise the likelihood of a more intense shadow war of revenge, probably against Israeli and Jewish targets in Europe, Latin America and even places like Thailand and Goa.  It’s simply not possible to defend against most such attacks. The prospect, at least, could have a positive second-order impact: finally persuading the Europeans to list Hizballah as the terrorist organization it is. But one never knows with the Europeans, whose capacity for supine behavior seems never to hit bottom. So this is a price that has to be reckoned in the decision mix, and it is not a small price.

Such strikes also ease Hizballah’s political problems inside Lebanon by making it look like what Hizballah is doing in support of the Assad regime is really part and parcel of the effort to destroy Israel. Hizballah has lots of trouble inside Lebanon right now, and that’s good up to, but not beyond, the point where those and others’ trouble might combine to produce a new Lebanese civil war (even if that’s likely anyway).

So why mount the strikes if the downsides are what they are? Well, I suppose you would have to ask Israeli Defense Minister Bogie Ayalon directly to get the real skivvy (assuming he’d tell you the truth), but some elements of explanation are fairly straightforward.

Hizballah already has some 60,000 rockets capable of hitting Israel. It has around 5,000 fairly well-trained day-job fighters and at least 15,000 reserve troops. Hizballah’s raison d’etre is the destruction of Israel, so it is not too far-fetched for Israeli decision-makers to assume that, sooner or later, there’s going to be another fight with these guys. With sarin and VX in the mix with all those missiles, what the Israelis are doing is essentially three-fold: diminishing at the margin Hizballah’s capacity to kill Israeli civilians; thus making a war, if it comes, shorter and hence less troublesome diplomatically; and signaling to all concerned (and the signal travels all the way to Tehran) that Israel will not hesitate to defend itself at times and places, and with means, of its own choosing.

The signal Israel sent to Hizballah has a special twist, not to be overlooked. Israel has essentially told the Hizballah directorate and its Syrian associates that its intelligence on what is coming into Syria, whether from Iran or indirectly from Russia, to the port of Tartus and then by land to and across the Beka’a and thence into Syria, is pretty darned good. It is also a message that should Assad fall and Hizballah’s weapons supplies be put in jeopardy as a result, Israel can annihilate any Hizballah military concentration from the air. What we have here is a kind of game of chicken: Think you can harm us? You better think about what we can do to you, now and especially in the not-too-distant-likely future, before you dare.

As important in this regard is the message on the crawl, so to speak, that no one is going to stop Israel from doing what it regards as necessary for its security. Israel demonstrated this past weekend the truth of what President Obama and Defense Secretary Hagel have lately said while standing on Israeli soil: Israel has the right to self-defense. Let it be noted that not so much as one eyelash worth of criticism surfaced from U.S. sources about those strikes. Very little mention has been made of that here, but be assured that for those in the region the silence was deafening.

Benghazigate

It may be that, even as I am writing this very sentence, a mid-level State Department official named Gregory Hicks is testifying before a Senate Committee and, in effect, establishing a line of complicity and cover-up with regard to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s role—never mind the hapless Susan Rice—in the tragic events of September 11, 2012 in Benghazi, Libya. You might be wondering, why am I writing about this before his testimony; how can I possibly know what will happen during the hearing? The answer is that it doesn’t matter what happens during this hearing, at least as far as Libya and U.S. policy toward Libya is concerned.

This hearing is not really about Libya, or U.S. policy, or what actually happened on September 11 of last year. This is about the presidential politics of 2016. The Republicans, led by John McCain and associates, are trying to smear the reputation of the person they think is the odds-on favorite to be the Democratic presidential nominee: Hillary Clinton. Personally, I’m not enthusiastic about the prospect of Mrs. Clinton as President, nor do I think she was such a good Secretary of State. But it is fantasy to try to hold her personally accountable for what happened during and after September 11, 2012 in Libya.

Vastly more important than that, it is besides the key policy lesson we should by now have learned from that whole unfortunate episode. Whatever the real mix of reasons that went into it, the Libya war was a mistake. It has touched off a cascade of completely predictable misanthropies (if I predicted them, which I did, I take it for granted that others, not least then-Defense Secretary Gates and the JCS did too). It has, for just one example, ensnarled the French in a real mess in Mali, probably made things worse in increasingly ghoulish northern Nigeria, and it is already washing back into Libya, threatening to alienate the southwestern, Tuareg chunk of Fezzan permanently from the Libyan state (such as it is). The sin that Susan Rice and Hillary Clinton (and others) committed was starting this stupid war in the first place, and then having no plan whatsoever for a post-Qadaffi “Phase IV” (remember Iraq?), because that is what began the sequence of events that got Ambassador Stevens and three other American officials killed.

Why aren’t Republicans on the make making this argument?  Why can’t they connect these obvious dots? Because they are in the main cheap hawks, wanting to use force more or less promiscuously without worrying, to all appearances, about aftereffects or how we’d pay for more major military operations in the region. Of course, if they were in power, instead of in a position to lob partisan propaganda grenades from the sidelines, they might adopt a more reasonable perspective; but they aren’t, so they don’t. Whatever the reasons, that’s all the Republicans have to offer these days on national security policy, unless one wants to reference the small-minority Rand Paul isolationist wing of the GOP (and please, let’s not do that).

Actually, if the GOP wants to give its inner-hawk room to fly, there’s an obvious way to do it—and it’s not at all obvious to me why they don’t jump on it with all four paws. Consider: It has been nearly eight months since Ambassador Stevens’s murder, and the U.S. government has not done a damned visible thing about it. We have a pretty good, if not necessarily court-actionable, idea who was behind this—a guy named Ahmed Abu Khattala. Not long after the murders, Abu Khatalla held a kind of informal press conference at an outdoor restaurant in which he strutted, lied a lot, and seemed to take pleasure, if not explicit credit, for the attack on the Benghazi consulate.  Yes, it took us nearly a decade to find bin-Laden—and in this light, and considering that Ayman al-Zawahiri is still breathing, why anyone would think that this was some sort of glorious success I swear I cannot understand—so eight months is not a long time in comparison. Yes, but still……. 

Now why is this? Well, I don’t doubt that Mike Vickers over at JSOC is trying to figure a way to whack this guy (and possibly some of his associates), but with the ROEs (rules of engagement) being what they are, and with the divisions of lawyers sprawled all over the Defense Department as they are, it’s not easy to get a clean shot. More important, no doubt, is that the State Department probably opposes doing anything without the cooperation and assent of the Libyan government. But the Libyan government is hopelessly feckless. We have not even been able to “interview” Abu Khatalla; Libyan authorities won’t pick him up or question him for fear of literal retaliation. And it seems clear that achieving swift justice in this matter is not high on the list of White House priorities.  

So nothing seems to be happening, and nothing probably will happen—which is predictable since it, too, is part of a very unfortunate pattern. Consider that five U.S. ambassadors have been murdered in office since 1965, three of them in the greater Middle East. In 1973, the PLO murdered Cleo Noel, Jr. in Khartoum, Sudan. No retribution was ever exacted for his murder. In 1976, Ambassador Francis E. Meloy, Jr., was murdered in Beirut.  No retribution was ever exacted for his murder. In 1979, Ambassador Adolph Dubs was murdered in Kabul. No retribution was ever exacted for his murder. And most recently Ambassador Stevens in Libya. Well, if you hate the United States, why not murder an American diplomat or three? There’s no price for it, apparently.

This is what the Republicans should be shouting about—the abject failure of the Obama Administration to raise any deterrent to attacks against American diplomatic personnel abroad.  But since it’s a lot less partisan an issue, they apparently can’t be bothered to think that far along.

The Russo-American Conference on Syria

Today’s big news is the announcement, by Secretary Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, of plans to hold a conference on Syria sometime this month. Now, if this conference—assuming it ever happens—can stop the civil war and lead to a relatively smooth landing (“smooth” in this case is a very elastic word) for the post-Assad future, it ought to be something that interests us. Since we are wise to keep American boots far away from Syria, and since the Administration may have blown a chance to engage Turkish force, with NATO and Arab League support, to stop the bloodletting more than a year ago, there are, as the President and others have recently said, no other good options.

But let’s interrogate this proposition a bit more carefully, shall we?  First, let’s ask “why now?” Why have the Russians agreed to this now, when they were so reluctant to do so before? After all, this has been a central element of the Administration’s policy, so-called, all along.  And my readers will please note that while, at the time, I lambasted the idea of seconding U.S. policy in Syria to the tender mercies of Vladimir Putin, a part of avoiding any kind of pre-election kinetic response, I also granted that in the fullness of time—after the battlefield situation developed further to Assad’s detriment—this sort of ploy might prove useful as part of an endgame. [STAFF: I looked in vain for where I said this, and I know I did; I hope someone can find it]. Will it?

The mainstream press has a theory of “why now?” As Anne Gearan and Scott Wilson put it in today’s Washington Post, it seems that “Russian support for Assad has softened since the emergence of new evidence that is government has probably used chemical weapons on a small scale in the war.” It may well be that the Russians are finally really to throw Assad to the wolves, but this simply cannot be the reason. The idea that the Russian leadership has been shocked—shocked, I say—morally affronted even, by the use of chemical weapons in Syria has got to rank as one of the most hilarious statements I have ever read in a supposedly serious newspaper. Are Gearan and Wilson kidding?

They adduce, too, that the protraction of the war in Syria is complicating Russian relations with Israel and with the broader Middle East. Not as funny, but just as silly.

And they observe that, “Kerry said that the administration’s decision on whether to arm the Syrian rebels—a move Obama has resisted—could be avoided if there is progress toward a political settlement.” Bingo!—now we’re getting somewhere, except that Gearan and Wilson don’t know where. Could it be that given the President’s tortured body language over his chemical weapons “red line”—reaching a level of equivocation that puts him nearly in the same category as Bill Clinton’s ruminations over what “is” is—the Russians are helping him to “just say no”? Do ya think?

So maybe the Russians mean by all this no more than the fabrication of a substitute for the ill-fated Kofi Annan mission, which had the effect of buying time for Assad to murder his way out of his problem. The fact that Putin reportedly kept Kerry waiting for three hours while he talked to his cabinet does not bode so well, if you know how to read Putin’s body language. If that is the case, there will be no conference, or in any event no real business to conduct at it if it ever does convene.

But perhaps this is too cynical a reading. Perhaps the Russians are finally ready to boot Assad, and hope that by participating in the facilitation of a transition they can hold on to their base at Tartus and retain some influence in the area, including selling weapons to an assortment of patrons.  Maybe they’ve concluded that half a loaf is better than none, which is what they’d likely end up with if the rebels win.  If so, if the Russians are serious about a conference, what sort of pre-conference deal might that portend (and yes, please be serious, of course there would have to be one)?

The Russians know that the United States, Israel and the West generally would benefit from Assad’s fall because Syria is Iran’s only ally, and the main means by which the Iranian regimes exerts influence in the Levant. Hizballah cannot readily maintain its strength without the Syrian factor. So if the Russians prove willing to help us dump Assad and harm Iranian interests, it’s a sure thing they’re going to demand something considerable in return. Not only would they not be Russians otherwise, they would not be competent diplomats of any description otherwise. So what would they ask?

Of course, I don’t know. But whatever they might suggest, I could imagine a situation in which the Russians double-down diplomatically by suggesting themselves (not exactly for the first time) as intermediaries in defusing the Iranian diplomatic bomb as a way to ward off the mullahs’ attainment of a real one. The Russians don’t hunger for an Iranian regime with nukes, though the prospect of one complicates our lives a lot more than it does theirs—so Moscow has been happy to stand aside and play risk-free irritant. And they see the President’s body language here, too: Obama will do practically anything, they suppose, to avoid having to take military action against Iran. That could put Putin potentially in a situation where Russia can play diplomatic middleman, able to extract quid pro quo “commissions” from all sides—American and Iranian, European, Arab and possibly Israeli, too. What a peachy prospect, huh?

In any event, time will tell if the Russians are preparing a stall tactic, or if they really mean to deal.  Either way, those who think that the heavens have just parted, and that rays of warm light are about to bathe poor benighted Syria in soft waves of diplomatic altruism, are in for a disappointment. But hey, maybe they can get a job writing news copy for the Washington Post.