As a general rule, I'm not so keen on the way Americans go about elections. My two biggest problems are that election campaigns go on for ever-longer periods and that our campaign finance rules are simply a way to dress up rampant corruption in volumes of complex code. I'm also not so keen on the electoral college, which ought to show up on Antiques Roadshow any day now were it not for the fact that I suspect it wouldn't fetch much of a valuation.

That said, one thing America does pretty well is debate. I say this despite the tenor of recent debates and the debating skills of recent candidates. Airing differences between candidates in a televised forum is an important innovation in democracy. And it is one that has yet to come to the United Kingdom.

That seems to be changing though with reports that Tory Leader David Cameron and the LDP's Nick Clegg have now agreed to take part in a televised debate in the run up to the next election. Prime Minister Gordon Brown has thus far declined to join the fray and frankly, I don't blame him. First of all, while television is good for those with "cool" personalities, it is not so good for people with none whatsoever. Secondly, as it becomes increasingly clear that Brown's government gave a well-thought out wink and a nod to the Scottish Authorities release of Libyan bomber Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, it is clear his team has manufactured yet another issue that can't work to their boss's advantage no matter how he addresses it.

That said, yesterday's statement that Brown "respected" the Scot decision to release the ailing terrorist certainly wasn't the way to calm the uproar over a mishandled mess that combines elements of placing compassion for a murderer over justice for his victims, alienating the U.K.'s principal ally and, no matter how many denials are made, currying favor with Libya's crackpot leader in exchange for better relations. On some level, for all the mouthwash about Megraghi's family's needs to see their dying relative (despite the unspeakable way he deprived hundreds of others of the same privilege), this is a situation in which it is clear that the Brown government has chosen to dance to the ka-ching of the cash register.

Given Brown's other bumbles (screwing up the British economy comes to mind) and the fact that David Cameron is a twit who will be an international embarrassment to the U.K. should he win the premiership, if you had to be someone on that stage you'd definitely want to be Clegg. But whatever the outcome of the exchange, it is a necessary exercise that ought to be part of the British electoral process ... and one which Brown should not be permitted to hide from.

Brown's associates argue he goes through the process of debate on the floor of the parliament every week. But for all its value "Question Time" has its own rules and its own ritual theater that invalidate it as the kind of debate to which British voters are entitled. And as the list of questions the average citizen or thinking journalist would want to ask these characters grows, the need for the debate grows more urgent and the prospect for a valuable exchange grows more compelling.

Let's see Brown defend playing footsie at a distance with Qaddafi. Let's see Cameron defend backing a racist right wing leader of the right in European parliament. This is one of those occasions where television is the best medium for providing both heat and light.

Leon Neal/AFP/Getty Images

What's a guy to do when the right is right? Especially when it's right about what it's been wrong about for so long. Especially if it's right for the wrong reasons? Especially if it's right about something that the sensible center and a president you otherwise admire is so wrong about?  

The simple answer, of course, is to swallow hard, agree and change the subject. The other approach is to blog.

Blogging allows room for (a little) nuance. So here's where that begins: When I refer to the "right" above, I actually only mean one guy, although he himself is a pillar of the conservative establishments, George Will.

Specifically, I am referring to his op-ed today entitled "It's Time to Leave Afghanistan." In this instance, not only is he correct, he is ahead of the curve, a place that must be as shockingly unfamiliar to most of his followers as a visit to Afghanistan's Helmand province, a place Will correctly cites as a great case study in the futility of U.S. efforts in that tragically embattled land.

Yet, every so often Will hits the nail on the head and this is one of those times. And there is no greater proof to that than moments after the newspaper containing his column landed on my doorstep, I heard Joe Scarborough saying that the right was up in arms about it. This is where we get to the part about Will being right about what the right has been wrong about for so long. Because while Afghanistan is increasingly Obama's war (and will be only more so if he accedes to the recommendations of his battlefield commander Stanley McChrystal to up our troop commitments and other investments there), it didn't start out that way.

We entered the country in an understandable national spasm of anger toward al Qaeda and the Taliban after 9/11. Any president would have done that, I think. But rather than keeping the mission narrowly focused on exacting punishment and reducing the capabilities of the terrorists and their protectors in a swift and limited action, we accepted the idea, almost without debate, that America should wage a war on terror. The alternative approach, argued the right, would be to treat it as purely a criminal matter which would underplay the risks and produce inadequate responses. This is true, of course. Which is why they said it. But, it was a false choice. There is a middle ground. One can imagine targeted, tactical responses to specific threats that would likely be just as effective in reducing the risks to America and Americans ... or more so when you consider that myriad escalating and amplifying effects of pursuing the war strategy as we have.

As for Will being right for the wrong reasons, I can only speculate about his motivations, of course. They may be very narrowly founded on a desire to do what's in the national interest. I hope that's all there is to it and not a desire to further politicize the sensitive decision Obama faces on this issue (see today's lead story in the Times by Peter Baker and Dexter Filkins). It is in the interest of no Americans to see this war spiral downward into an even worse, more futile entanglement than it is. As Will correctly says, now is the time to reverse course, define goals even more narrowly and undertake the exit.  Keep resources nearby. Strike fiercely against imminent threats using the distance weapons and, where essential, special forces. But stop trying to win the unwinnable. Recognize that shutting one terrorist enclave only creates another somewhere else. Stop lying to ourselves about Hamid Karzai who is rapidly becoming as crappy a former American puppet as any in the long list of supremely crappy former American puppets we have ever propped up. Disconnect ourselves from the futile charade of saying we are trying to contain the poppy business when in fact what we are often doing is protecting its key players ... men who are certainly responsible for more deaths worldwide than all the terrorist enemies in the region.

And in so doing, move to a new footing in Pakistan, reduce the risk of our getting involved in or exacerbating that country's deep civil tensions. Focus on securing their nuclear weapons and reducing any threat they may pose to India, our most "natural" important ally in the region.

In short, President Obama should recognize that of all the mistakes made early in his administration, trading "the wrong war" in Iraq for "the right war" in AfPak was probably the biggest and that he has a chance to stop and reverse course now, based on what he has learned (and Admiral Mullen seems to know and imply through his public statements) and not just get out of the country, not just avoid an even longer-term involvement in this expanding war, but also to once and for all reject the Bush administration's to the "war on terror" not just in name but in deed.

Where there's a Will, there's a way.

MANAN VATSYAYANA/AFP/Getty Images

And Dick Cheney thinks he knows something about terror. Republican terror threats are for sissies. Even Tom Ridge is willing to admit ... some of the time ... that they kinda-sorta-maybe were overblown. (Ridge's now-you-see-em-now-you-don't revelations have permanently damaged him. Either he screwed up back in the day by caving to pressure to elevate the threat level or he has screwed up by misrepresenting the situation in his memoirs or he screwed up most recently by caving to pressure to back off the "explosive" admissions that he thought would sell enough books to pay for his retirement.) 

But Democrats have all the luck. They didn't want a national terror threat. They don't even like talking about the "war on terror" (most of the time). But they've got a doozy brewing that makes the country's post-9/11 post traumatic stress disorder induced inclination to look for a terrorist behind every potted palm look mild by comparison.

Yesterday, I walked across the campus of Columbia University in New York and amid the light blue and white balloons and banners fluttering in welcome of new students, amid the registration tables and the orientation sign-up booths, every so often there were large Purell dispensers. No explanatory signs. No instructions, just big honking containers of disinfectant crying out to every passerby to stop and make that next handshake a safer one. The absence of signs made it all the more ominous. Signs weren't necessary as they once were along highways when people were asked to call in and report "suspicious activity."

While this threat was as hard to see as was the one that had the Bushies in a swivet, you didn't need Karl Rove's classified Ouija board to magnify this one, a microscope would do. 

The other day a dean at a major DC-area academic institution indicated that he and others on his team had spent much of the summer developing the distance learning protocols they would employ if H1N1 virus required them to shut down their campus and send everyone home. At around the same time, I received an email from the college one of my daughters attends explaining just how they would tackle swine flu. Today, the city of New York, a city now reporting that perhaps 800,000 of its citizens caught the disease in the first phase of its appearance, announced a new set of guidelines for how they would handle the disease as it appeared again this flu season.

Estimates suggest that perhaps as many as 90,000 Americans could die of the disease this next time around. That may be high. Estimates of the severity of this pandemic have been inconsistent and fortunately, thus far the illness has not taken an extreme toll. But the nervousness is palpable. For example, take this CBS story of a school district in Long Island that has banned touching for the foreseeable future (of course, just after my daughters leave high school is when they decide to ban touching!)

Chest bumps. High fives. Hugs and handshakes. Glen Cove Middle School students Ali Slaughter and Hannah Seltzer say that's what friends do on the first day of school. But when students in the Nassau community return to school next week, the superintendent will be urging abstinence. Everyone from the tiniest tots to the biggest high school football players will be asked to limit skin-on-skin contact in an attempt to prevent the spread of swine flu when it re-emerges this fall.

Thus far, it seems authorities worldwide have responded swiftly to the pandemic and, even if it seems like they are over-reacting, their caution is not misplaced. Flu annually kills 250,000-500,000 people worldwide each year, 36,000 in the United States. And that's not when a particularly virulent strain comes along, such as the 1918 pandemic that killed perhaps 50-100 million people and infected perhaps 500 million.

The 9/11 attacks claimed fewer people than would die worldwide of flu on the average weekend. So, it is quite clear that the current invisible threat is a lot worse than the old invisible threat. But there is another way to look at all this. First, it casts the current health care debate in a different light. Having 50 million people who don't have health insurance (thus more reluctant to see a doctor and more inclined to seek free emergency room treatment) puts everyone else at greater risk. Having hospitals teetering near insolvency and cutting back services does likewise. When you think about the real threats to our homeland security a broken health system (especially in the context of the threats of not just epidemics but biological or WMD attacks) may be at the top of the list.

Next, if this epidemic gets as severe as some people worry, it'll very quickly overshadow Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, and the financial crisis. It'll become Obama's war and, absent a crisp, orderly, sustained response, his Katrina. There's no sign that's happening yet. It may not rise to that level. The response may be excellent and it could be one of the decisive factors in the 2010 elections in either case. But for the first time in years, a nation that has come to view threat level Orange as normal has started to get edgy over something bigger. Tell me Mr. Ridge, what color should we use to indicate to everyone that the threat could be real?

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

I can't be sure, not being a neuroscientist, but I have this theory that the brain works kind of like a Dustbuster. It sucks up all sorts of stuff and then every so often you have to dump it out or it gets clogged up and stops working. Here are some of the bits and pieces that came out this morning:

 

When Does Lack of Intimacy Mean You're Almost Certain to be Screwed?

I spoke with a friend yesterday who is a real live foreign policy professional. We were discussing the fact that my two daughters are heading off to college in a few days and that I would be an empty-nester soon. (Or as I like to call it: "Crawling under the bed and curling up in a fetal position.") He said it was a great opportunity to get to know one's wife again, recounting his experience of having his kids depart and then looking up and asking himself, "Who the hell is this woman in my living room?"

I responded that with the kind of skills he seems to have developed he could have become a marriage counselor and then added, "come to think of it, given your current line of work, that probably comes in handy." He then told a story about how a lack of what he called "intimacy"...of the diplomatic sort...was a challenge in one international context with which he was dealing. 

I couldn't resist pointing out that in marriage, a lack of intimacy usually means you are not getting fucked... but in diplomacy, it means you almost certainly will be.

The Republicans' W-Shaped Recovery

America's Republican leadership is almost giddy with the turbulence they are causing for the Obama Administration on health care.  After the political death march of the Bush years and the drubbing by Obama, they are desperate for signs of life in their party.  But frankly, after some examination, my death panel votes "do not resuscitate." 

The problem is that despite the media's delight with covering nutsy women with Obama-as-Nazi posters, great retorts to them like that of Barney Frank who to his great credit does not suffer vile imbeciles lightly, Kansas congresswomen musing aloud about the G.O.P.'s need for a "great white hope", porn-star-named Idaho gubernatorial candidate Rex Rammell joking about "hunting" Obama, and the like, stirring up hatred is not enough to bring even the Republican Party back to life. 

There is almost zero possibility that some form of health care legislation will not be signed into law this year.  It may not be everything Obama wanted, but the reality is it will probably big the biggest set of reforms in decades.  Recent polling covered in today's Washington Post also shows growing support for Obama's climate and energy proposals which are the next big item in the pipeline. And on the one issue that the Republicans probably had a good positive case to make, regarding deficit reduction, statements from Tim Geithner and others in the administration make it clear that as we move into recovery, they are going to begin cutting making reducing the deficit a top priority. Given that the Republican Party's actual record on the deficit is so woeful, this too will make their lives much more difficult.

The result: after hopes of a rebound on the back of their health care opposition, the Republicans could be faced with the same "W" shaped scenario economists like Nouriel Roubini are worried about re: the economy.  Further, leaderless and in disarray, they won't even be in a good position to take advantage of that if it happens. The result might be picking up only a modest number of seats-below historical norms-in the 2010 mid-term elections and leaving a more experienced Obama team with very substantial majorities for the second half of his first term.

How do you say "plus ca change" in Spanish?

I'm sure there are those on Capitol Hill who think depriving the administration of senior officials has little or no effect. Most don't think about the consequences of their actions at all, of course. But perhaps if they would direct their attentions southward they might benefit from the case study that is unfolding.

When President Obama left the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago there was much hope for a new era of north-south relations in the Americas.  Now, just a few months later, with Antonia Valenzuela, Obama's nominee for Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, cooling his heels while there is a hold on his nomination, things have taken a turn for the worst. In rapid succession, the countries of the region, some very well disposed toward Obama at the outset, have been disappointed by the U.S. failure to aggressively promote the restoration of a democratically elected president in Honduras, its not-so-deftly managed announcement of a military basing deal with the Colombians and its too-quiet response to moves to by Colombia's President Uribe to revise his country's constitution so he can seek another term of office. This turn of events has resulted in some tough talk publicly and, apparently, in private exchanges such as that Obama recently had with Brazil's President Lula, a man with whom the new U.S. president has established a very good rapport.

To many in the region, the new U.S. President is starting to look, as they might say down on the estancia, to be all hat and no cattle. Maybe, they are murmuring...well, some are murmuring, some like Hugo Chavez are shouting it from the rooftop...nothing really has changed with the U.S. 

With a little more bandwidth devoted to these issues the U.S. could easily have managed all of them to a better outcome. They could have done more to pressure the interim regime in Honduras to enable the return of the elected president and they could have addressed his efforts to rig Honduran democracy in his favor by helping to ensure a transparent election this Fall. As for the Colombian bases, that shouldn't have been a big issue. The U.S. has had a presence in the region for years. Coordination and communication could easily have been handled better. And as for Uribe, a more forceful public message that he should pursue his distinguished public service career in a new role would have been appropriate.

Instead, whenever Valenzuela is confirmed (in September, one hopes), he is going to find he has some repair work to do in the region, which will be an unfortunate distraction from some of the bigger issues on the regional agenda like: working with Mexico on our shared security concerns, helping to combat the shift of drug transshipment to Central America which could have a very destabilizing effect, working to shape a new partnership with Brazil, dealing with climate, with economic recovery issues, etc.  

SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images

I think Paul Wolfowitz performs a useful service by thoughtfully and systematically examining the underlying flaws in the current conception of "realism" -- the hype surrounding it and the "policies" associated with it. If only someone had more effectively done the same with neoconservatism -- which, of course, was neither new nor, as it was practiced by the Bush administration, remotely conservative. (How could anything so politically and militarily risky, fiscally wasteful, and seemingly allergic to any principle, be called "conservative"?)

Reading Wolfowitz's piece, I kept thanking Providence for giving me a concentration in English in college rather than say, political science. I actually was taught what words mean. (In fact, being an English major taught me that "political science" may be the humdinger of all oxymorons ... even if calling "realists" realists and "neoconservatives" neoconservatives comes pretty darn close.) Economists have their "lies, damned lies, and statistics" and clearly, political scientists have their "lies, damned lies, and labels."

It's not just "neocons" and "realists" of course who are mislabeled or falsely advertising themselves. There is nothing "conservative" about the reckless fiscal policies of "conservative" champions like Reagan or Bush, nothing "progressive" about the New Deal nostalgia of many on the left, nothing "pro-life" about abortion opponents who also use a misreading of the Second Amendment to allow them stock up on assault weapons, nothing "liberal" about folks who think the answer to everything is greater government control of people's lives. Say what you may about the underlying beliefs, the labels are meaningless.

That said, if we can stipulate the labels are primarily forms of branding and positioning that are as related to the underlying realities as Madison Avenue claims of the health-benefits of smoking in the middle of the last century, then we can move on to the more relevant policy questions raised by Wolfowitz. These turn not on whether "realists" are more realistic than other policymakers but rather on whether the "realism" peddled to the public actually holds water as an approach.

(Continue reading...) 

Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images

When I was just out of college, one of my pals from school landed a plum job as a production assistant at ABC News. Sometimes, we would meet his pals from the ABC News room for a drink near their studios in the West 60s in Manhattan. One of them was a terrific guy named Tom Capra, son of filmmaker Frank Capra, and I vividly remember him going into a rant over a beer about Ted Turner's hare-brained new 24-hour news operation which Tom and all his colleagues referred to derisively as the "Chicken Noodle Network." 

At the time, CNN's aspirations and shenanigans and low salaries seemed beneath the serious work that was done by the likes of their Peter Jennings and Barbara Walters and Harry Reasoner and the other big stars of evening news. Back then those other stars were people like Walter Cronkite and John Chancellor, a mostly male group who traced their journalistic DNA back to Edward R. Murrow and that CBS operation that was kind of the Olduvai Gorge of broadcast news.

Now most of those stars are dead and oddly, the Chicken Noodle Network which rose up, revolutionized television and in fact, modern society, has in fact recently transformed itself into the Cadaver News Network. Between its non-stop coverage of Michael Jackson's demise (that was a guy who really knew how to make an exit), the 24/7 coverage of the death of Teddy Kennedy that has now (probably temporarily) usurped it and the age of most of its commentators and viewers, CNN is one of those ideas I feel as though I have seen gone through its full life cycle -- from laughing stock to parody of itself.

Candidly, it's hard to imagine the world without CNN and when global crises strike -- as most recently in the case of the Iranian uprisings -- it can roll out its really good journalists and provide the sort of coverage that revolutionized the business. But it has never really figured out in almost three decades of existence what to do the rest of the time. Some of its answers to that question, like Larry King, are both superannuated and intoxicated with sheer trivia (otherwise how do you explain the appearance of Kate Gosselin, a woman who any respectable news organization ought to treat like intellectual ebola virus, something that once in your system pretty much dooms your credibility to bleed out through every orifice?)

Part of its solution to the issue of what to do when there is no news is, of course, a sort of repetition of recycled headlines and clips that I believe will ultimately be revealed to be one of the torture techniques used by the CIA in its interrogation of detainees. But another element of it has been their pioneering of the coverage of world events ... and particularly those in Washington ... as a kind of reality television show. 

What they do is put together a cast of people who are certain to fight with one another and then they toss a story in the middle of them and watch them tear at it like hyenas with a tasty piece of wildebeest. In these sessions, the news is no longer central, it is just a catalyst to generate more intense inter-personal drama, the precise equivalent of the latest bit of Tyra Mail or Gordon Ramsay's latest challenge for his chefs on "Hell's Kitchen." It's Real World DC and we're just waiting for Bill Bennett to give it good to Donna Brazile. Of course, when they move into funereal mode the terms of the interactions are more muted but that is more than made up for by the stately soundtrack and dramatic graphics that are the shiny wrappers crying out that this is "new and improved" version of the same old story. Want more filler? Let's see what our viewers are emailing into us about us. Or let's see how the Internet is covering the same damn thing we are.

At the end of the day, it all calls to mind the Saturday Night Live bit that only slightly pre-dated my conversations with Tom Capra, the one in which Chevy Chase would periodically announce "Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead." I don't say this to minimize stories of real importance ... nor do I say it out of some misplaced nostalgia for "the golden age" of news. We live in the golden age of news. The way it is delivered on the web trumps everything every done before in history whether you are looking for ultra-local news on whose cat got caught in whose tree or you want 1000 perspectives on the latest election in Cameroon. 

CNN played a big role in triggering the transformation that has brought us to where we are today. But now, they as well as MSNBC and Fox seem to have lost their way. What they do best is cover breaking stories. They should recognize that stately music and somber logos do not dignity make just as fights among their contract commentators are neither newsworthy nor, for the most part, terribly interesting. They should also recognize that repeating things over and over again and having the otherwise excellent Wolf Blitzer say, as he too often does, that something is "historic" does not actually make an event bigger than it is. It only makes their already dragged-out coverage longer. There must be a better way ... more focused on hard news coverage and taut analysis. There has got to be a programming choice other than that between dead air and dead people.

Rick Diamond/Getty Images for Allied Advertising

Despite a growing desire on my part to avoid the cage-match side of blogging, it is hard not to respond to Christian Brose's post "What is David Rothkopf smoking?" Brose seems to have, in President Obama's words, become all "wee-wee'd up" over my article in Sunday's Washington Post. I respond, of course, as a public service because so much of what he said provides a useful insight into how far we have come since the days of the Bush administration and how desperate Bush apologists are to find a way to suggest that their man and the policies they promoted were not actually the nadir of American foreign policy.

I should note however, that I also do this reluctantly because I think Brose is a pretty good writer and a fairly thoughtful guy. Still, when someone suggests that I have been a member of "the foreign policy hoi-polloi that went into intellectual hibernation in 2004 and only awoke this January" I figure, it's probably OK to offer a few words on behalf of my views. (Although it does explain the acorn residue I found in my cheeks.) 

I will ignore for a moment the fact that Brose clearly is willing to spot the world the first term of the Bush administration as indefensible and focus on his core notion that somehow the years Condi was at State were almost indistinguishable in intent, concept and execution from what we have seen to date from the Obama team. It should be noted that coincidentally Brose was a speech-writer at State during the Bush administration.

Let's take his points one at a time:

• Brose opens with a snarky summary of my article. The thrust is: Obama foreign policy is not revolutionary and I am kissing the asses of the Obama administration. I refer folks back to the past eight months of daily blogging as evidence that I have no inclination to butter up the new team and regularly do not. He does not note that he spends the entire article kissing the wholly discredited asses of his former employers.

• He then goes on to wonder aloud how anyone who "thinks and writes about foreign policy for a living" could think Clinton or Obama are transforming U.S. foreign policy. I have to admit, whatever the flaws in their individual policies, I find it hard to see how anyone could think they are not. Does he really think these folks just picked up where George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice and Dick Cheney left off? In Iraq? In Afghanistan and Pakistan? With their approach to engagement? With their commitment to multilateralism? With their approach to Guantanamo or torture? With their outreach to the Muslim world? With their commitment to reverse nuclear weapons proliferation? I could go on ... but will just take his main points in succession to continue in this vein.

• Brose lists Bush administration development "advancements" to suggest that they effectively covered the waterfront when it comes to reforming the development process. While Bush actually did some good here (and I didn't argue he didn't), that doesn't mean the work is done or that what the Clinton team is doing at State is not promising. The Obama team inherited an aid apparatus that was still deeply dysfunctional, underfunded and focused on missions that were not core. The QDDR process I mention in the article represents a commitment to strategic reevaluation that recognizes the fluid nature of international affairs today and seeks to institutionalize change in much the same way that the QDR does at DoD. Further, there is a massive amount of work that needs to be done if development policy is to be rendered effective in the current environment ... creating the ability, for example, to effectively do post-conflict reconstruction that so flummoxed the Bush administration for so long comes to mind, as does a civilian-side Goldwater-Nichols and other ideas that are currently being reviewed within State and the NSC process.

• His next paragraph argues that since the Bush administration participated in many multilateral forums that is the same thing as the Obama administration's commitment to the centrality of new partnerships. Can he actually believe that the Bush administration was a champion of multilateralism? By this same theory all people who go to church are virtuous and I, who talk a very good diet game, am actually 20 pounds lighter than reported this morning by the scale. Admittedly, there was a line in my article that was cut due to space considerations that I wish had been left in which said that while many of the current policies have roots in the past, what is happening now is very different because of the way it is being approached, the centrality it is being given, the degree of involvement of top officials, etc. Nothing illustrates this as much for me as the role emerging powers are being given. First, this is not a "Bush-era" inheritance. I know. Because I actually helped develop and run the first inter-agency process focused on U.S.-Emerging Markets relations during the Clinton years. Second, he cites a four-year-old Condi speech in which she mouths words he may have written about partners in the emerging world but seriously, wasn't he paying attention? At the time she did it, the perception that the U.S. was arrogantly acting apart from the rest of the world was near its apotheosis. The core concepts of Bush era foreign policy were of "us and them" and of our ability and willingness to effectively act alone or within sham coalitions to advance our interests. The core concept of the Obama administration is that just won't work anymore and that effective partnerships with a core group that includes new allies are the sine qua non of international progress.

• He then goes on to say that the administration has too little to show for its efforts. He minimizes restoring American relations with the world as if that weren't central to foreign policy. He then argues that this is not so meaningful because "cooperation has not always followed." Seriously? Will the Obama-Clinton restoration of America's relations with the world only be complete if everyone in the world cooperates with us always? This reveals his core misunderstanding of the nature of the kind of partnerships on which the Obama-Clinton team is seeking to build U.S. foreign policy. Also, in terms of not having much to show for their efforts, that's just ridiculous. Only seven months into their efforts U.S. policy has changed dramatically in Iraq and in AfPak, the administration has become deeply involved in the Arab-Israeli issue (which took the Bush administration about 7 years to discover), it has helped engineer an international response to the financial crisis, it has restored America's damaged reputation worldwide, the president's Prague and Cairo speeches represented dramatic breaks with the Bush past and set U.S. policies with the Muslim world and re: elimination of nuclear weapons in a new direction, and so on. It's just the beginning ... but it is a beginning very unlike the past eight years.

• Further his one-sided assessments of issues worldwide is full of inaccuracies. He says others won't help with Guantanamo but fails to note the benefits accruing to us from shutting it down. He says India and China don't share enthusiasm for a climate deal while failing to acknowledge that we are in a global negotiation, that the United States is now deeply involved as an advocate for progress for the first time or to note the differences in position between India and China (China is much more forward leaning and inclined to a deal). He inaccurately suggests that the only thing we can agree with the Russians is to reduce the number of nukes (as if that were a small thing). He says Pakistan is dysfunctional but fails to note how much more we are currently doing to address that. He says Iran and North Korea are a still difficult while failing to acknowledge the recent progress made with the North Koreans or that engagement with Iran is a real departure (on which the jury is admittedly still out).

• He concludes with the notion that we "are still a world of nations" (simplistic and wrong ... we are a world of many actors some of the most important of which on key issues are non-state actors) and that the Obama administration has been getting "mugged" by our differences since coming into office. This suggests again a misunderstanding of the nature of international relations. Good foreign policy does not produce a problem-free world. It just minimizes threats while advancing our interests. But, it also fails to note the central point that no doubt will resonate in the mind of the rest of the planet...which is that during the Bush years, it was the United States that was mugging the world and the system of international law we had fought for a century to advance.

That's the key point about these early days of this new foreign policy team. All administrations talk about partnerships and new relationships. To my mind, this one seems to believe what it is saying and is doing something about ... and at the very least is not as transparently hypocritical about such matters as was its predecessor. That in and of itself is perhaps the transformation most of the world was most hoping for. 

PAUL J. RICHARDS/AFP/Getty Images

Reports late today that Attorney General Eric Holder is appointing career Justice Department prosecutor John Durham to investigate whether CIA interrogators may have tortured detainees in violation of the law have stirred the predictable outcries. 

From Capitol Hill, a collection of Republican Senators produced a letter saying, "The intelligence community will be left to wonder whether actions taken today in the interest of national security will be subject to legal recriminations when the political winds shift." Rumors even swirled that renewed scrutiny of the agency's activities had CIA Director Leon Panetta threatening to resign, though the White House rejected them as unfounded. 

Here's the reality: the Senators who sent up the protest letter have a point. The law should not be allowed to be tossed and twisted with every new breeze of public opinion. The law is the law. And if one administration misinterprets public outrage at a crime like a terror attack as license to overlook the law or to bend it to suit the mood of the moment, it is not an option for the next administration to question that action ... it is an obligation. The whole point of having a legal system is to have objective standards by which to define acceptable parameters of behavior. 

No employee of the CIA has anything to fear if they acted within those objective standards. If the investigation demonstrates that anyone in the government misinterpreted the law for whatever reason and acted in violation of those laws, their actions should be evaluated within the context of the justice system. If they had good legal advice and acted within a reasonable interpretation of the law, then they have nothing to fear. 

Those who fear the investigation are revealing their lack of faith in our justice system ... a trait that happens to have been shared by those who went beyond the boundaries of that system in the name of justice. With some luck the investigation will remind them that by suggesting justice may lie outside those boundaries or by suggesting that fundamental rights may be waived due to circumstances they do more damage to the system than those they were interrogating were capable of.

My only concern: that by defining the investigation too narrowly, the rank and file of the CIA will be sacrificed while those who insisted the laws be bent, broken and ignored will be free to walk away, perhaps even complaining from the sidelines about the process. If this investigation finds violations of the law, we can only hope that the well-respected Durham will follow the actions in question through to their origins and not prosecute foot-soldiers for the violations of their most senior leaders.

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