U.S. and Iranian Diplomats Talk in Geneva

U.S. diplomats are talking one on one with Iran and group talks are being held. High-level officials from Britain, France, Russia and Germany are taking part. China sent a low-level official:

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It is the first known direct high-level meeting between Washington and Tehran in years of attempts to persuade Iran to freeze its uranium enrichment program. Iran says the program is peaceful, but some western nations fear it could eventually produce nuclear weapons.

Some hope
The EU's Javier Solana, who is formally heading the one-day negotiations with Jalili, was upbeat before the start of the talks in an 18th century villa in Geneva.

The fact that the meeting is taking place at all offers some hope, reflecting both sides' desire to talk, despite a spike in tensions over last week's revelations by Iran that it had been secretly building a new uranium enrichment plant. MSNBC

Now that Obama is willing to hold diplomatic talks with Iran, the U.S. has world support, said Bob Shrum. Then John Feehry, a republican strategist, wonders aloud if Iran is playing us. Leave it to the republican.

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Will Obama Get Tough On Israel?

No one says we have to quit Israel. We just have to be reasonable about solving the conflict there. Bush's I'm-With-Israel is not foreign policy.

Newsweek: The issue at hand is to find the right balance in America's ties with Israel. Driven by shared values and based on America's 60-year commitment to Israel's security and well-being, the special relationship is rock solid. But for the past 16 years, the United States has allowed that special bond to become exclusive in ways that undermine America's, and Israel's, national interests.

If Obama is serious about peacemaking he'll have to adjust that balance in two ways. First, whatever the transgressions of the Palestinians (and there are many, including terror, violence and incitement), he'll also have to deal with Israel's behavior on the ground. The Gaza crisis is a case in point. Israel has every reason to defend itself against Hamas. But does it make sense for America to support its policy of punishing Hamas by making life unbearable for 1.5 million Gazans by denying aid and economic development? The answer is no.

Gaza Lesson

I've got my fingers crossed that Obama will actually come out and say something like this:

CSM: When the smoke finally drifts from Gaza, and the human rights investigations begin – into the death of schoolchildren in midday rocket attacks or the demolition of a women's dormitory – sober voices will ask why Israel has still not learned a fundamental lesson: By trying to crush your enemy, you only make him stronger.

American can't continue to side with Israel. We can't side with the Palestinians either. There is some sort of foreign policy in between. 
Update: Israeli ground troops attack Hamas. Whatever.

McCain Just Doesn't Get It

McCain is like George Bush in the way of not getting things.
Obama gives a rich speech on a complex topic, laying out his plans for Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
McCain calls Obama's strategy premature because, he says, Obama hasn't talked to the ground forces. (McCain's counter speech).
I have one answer: Leadership. Leaders assert themselves, they lead the way. Obama is saying this is the deal, this is the strategy, this is what I want to happen. Make it happen. That's what leaders do.
Obama's visit to Iraq lends itself to tactics -- how to accomplish the strategy. This is just basic stuff and it's so apparent to me that McCain is George Bush that I want to scream but all I have is this blog to vent to and so I do.
Obama has plenty of foreign policy advisers who have already given him the information he needs. Obama has already put plenty of thought into foreign policy. This is his strong suit, contrary to perceptions that he's weak on foreign policy.
McCain is too old fashioned in his thinking. We are in a new world, which calls for new thinking.

CNN: McCain attacked the Illinois senator's opposition to the surge policy in Iraq and highlighted his own proposal for victory in Afghanistan.

"[Obama] is speaking today about his plans for Iraq and Afghanistan before he has even left, before he has talked to Gen. Petraeus, before he has seen the progress in Iraq, and before he has set foot in Afghanistan for the first time," McCain said at a campaign event in New Mexico.

"In my experience, fact-finding missions usually work best the other way around: First you assess the facts on the ground, then you present a new strategy."

Oh, and McCain finally got around to explaining his policy in Afghanistan.
All his blather about the "surge" is bogus. Bush-McCain say the "surge" worked. What do they mean by that? Highly debatable. This big "surge" strategy was adding more troops. That's it. That's all. There had to be more military intervention because diplomacy and politics failed because our current administration is incompetent.

What Obama Will Do

Here's a good diary at DailyKos:

What WILL Barack Obama actually do?

He’ll appoint Supreme Court judges from the “We ♥ the Constitution” wing of the law.

He’ll get us out of Iraq some number close to 36500 days sooner than crotchety guy.

He won’t start trying to kill Iranians… unprovoked.

He will restore some order to the tax system.

Oh, and... this.

Anything beyond that… is pretty much just double stuff on the Oreo™.

Don’t think that’s enough?

In other words, get off the ideologies. He can't be everything to everyone. But he'll be miles, centuries, better than McCain.

Obama's Dignity Politics

we should lift ourselves and others out of poverty because it's the right thing to do. but it's not only the right and moral thing, it's the best way for the united states to manuever as a citizen of the world going forward. obama understands this and it's one of the top reasons why i support him.
anyone that argues against or distorts this kind of foreign policy is out of touch. look no further than george bush and john mccain.

baltimore sun: So what makes Mr. Obama potentially America's first soft power president? To begin, there's his color and his name.

Saudis I met were both fascinated by the prospect that America could elect a black man with the middle name Hussein, and generally convinced it could never happen. In Brazil, a country whose elites are European in descent and mindset but that also features a huge population of Afro-Brazilians, there is a similar feeling of cautious optimism.

Then, more significantly, there is Mr. Obama's potentially pathbreaking foreign policy doctrine, explained by Spencer Ackerman in a recent cover piece for The American Prospect. Mr. Obama and his foreign policy team emphasize "dignity promotion" over "democracy expansion."

If that notion itself sounds a wee bit soft, think again. What Mr. Obama believes is that in societies paralyzed by dehumanizing poverty, ethnic and tribal violence, or lacking safe or abundant food and water supplies, not only is there little hope of democracies emerging, there's a much greater chance to germinate terrorist ideas. A refugee with an empty belly is not much interested in discourse on constitutional theories of checks and balances.

Meanwhile, back home, the Bush administration fertilizes rising anti-American radicalism with its reckless bad-neighbor policies. In his speech last week endorsing Mr. Obama, former Sen. John Edwards talked about the walls that divide us here in America - but then argued there's also a wall distorting our global image. "The America as the beacon of hope is behind that wall," said Mr. Edwards. "And all the world sees now is a bully. They see Iraq, Guantanamo, secret prisons and government that argues that waterboarding is not torture."

A 2007 British Broadcasting Corp. survey in which people around the world were asked to rate 12 major countries in terms of their positive and negative influence revealed that America's negative rating (51 percent) was third worst, between "axis of evil" members Iran and North Korea.

As to those who say they don't care what foreigners think - or worse, who seem to wear anti-Americanism, whether deriving from Paris or Karachi or Addis Ababa, as some sort of badge of honor - this is a myopic and dangerous way to look at the world.

Obama’s Advisers
Obama’s Team

Obama’s Foreign Policy Brain Trust

Obama's Foreign Policy Smarts

when it comes to foreign policy, bush only had good intentions (that's arguable) but no smarts (that's not arguable).
obama has guts, vision and brilliance and that will make all the difference. in fact, people seem to be surprised at just how smart obama is. the bush people don't seem to know what to do with themselves, all this talk of intelligent foreign policy. they swipe but they sound like fools.
obama's still being sorely underestimated, which is a good thing in at least one respect. he'll catch mccain and the like off guard more often.
thomas friedman at the nyt:

Pssst. Have you heard? I have. I heard that Barack Obama once said there has to be “an end” to the Israeli “occupation” of the West Bank “that began in 1967.” Yikes!

Pssst. Have you heard? I have. I heard that Barack Obama said that not only must Israel be secure, but that any peace agreement “must establish Palestine as a homeland for the Palestinian people.” Yikes!

Pssst. Have you heard? I have. I heard that Barack Obama once said “the establishment of the state of Palestine is long overdue. The Palestinian people deserve it.” Yikes! Yikes! Yikes!

Those are the kind of rumors one can hear circulating among American Jews these days about whether Barack Obama harbors secret pro-Palestinian leanings. I confess: All of the above phrases are accurate. I did not make them up.

There’s just one thing: None of them were uttered by Barack Obama. They are all direct quotes from President George W. Bush in the last two years. Mr. Bush, long hailed as a true friend of Israel, said all those things.

What does that tell you? It tells me several things. The first is that America today has — rightly — a bipartisan approach to Arab-Israeli peace that is not going to change no matter who becomes our next president. America, whether under a Republican or Democratic administration, is now committed to a two-state solution in which the Palestinians get back the West Bank, Gaza and Arab parts of East Jerusalem, and Israel gives back most of the settlements in the West Bank, offsetting those it does not evacuate with land from Israel.

The notion that a President Barack Obama would have a desire or ability to walk away from this consensus American position is ludicrous. But given the simmering controversy over whether Mr. Obama is “good for Israel,” it’s worth exploring this question: What really makes a pro-Israel president?

Personally, as an American Jew, I don’t vote for president on the basis of who will be the strongest supporter of Israel. I vote for who will make America strongest. It’s not only because this is my country, first and always, but because the single greatest source of support and protection for Israel is an America that is financially and militarily strong, and globally respected. Nothing would imperil Israel more than an enfeebled, isolated America.

I don’t doubt for a second President Bush’s gut support for Israel, and I think it comes from his gut. He views Israel as a country that shares America’s core democratic and free-market values. That is not unimportant.

But what matters a lot more is that under Mr. Bush, America today is neither feared nor respected nor liked in the Middle East, and that his lack of an energy policy for seven years has left Israel’s enemies and America’s enemies — the petro-dictators and the terrorists they support — stronger than ever. The rise of Iran as a threat to Israel today is directly related to Mr. Bush’s failure to succeed in Iraq and to develop alternatives to oil.

Does that mean Mr. Obama would automatically do better? I don’t know. To me, U.S. presidents succeed or fail when it comes to Arab-Israeli diplomacy depending on two criteria that have little to do with what’s in their hearts. more

david brooks on obama and lebanon:
Hezbollah is one of the world’s most radical terrorist organizations. Over the last week or so, it has staged an armed assault on the democratic government of Lebanon.

Barack Obama issued a statement in response. He called on “all those who have influence with Hezbollah” to “press them to stand down.” Then he declared, “It’s time to engage in diplomatic efforts to help build a new Lebanese consensus that focuses on electoral reform, an end to the current corrupt patronage system, and the development of the economy that provides for a fair distribution of services, opportunities and employment.”

That sentence has the whiff of what President Bush described yesterday as appeasement. Is Obama naïve enough to think that an extremist ideological organization like Hezbollah can be mollified with a less corrupt patronage system and some electoral reform? Does he really believe that Hezbollah is a normal social welfare agency seeking more government services for its followers? Does Obama believe that even the most intractable enemies can be pacified with diplomacy? What “Lebanese consensus” can Hezbollah possibly be a part of?

If Obama believes all this, he’s not just a Jimmy Carter-style liberal. He’s off in Noam Chomskyland.

That didn’t strike me as right, so I spoke with Obama Tuesday to ask him what he meant by all this.

Right off the bat he reaffirmed that Hezbollah is “not a legitimate political party.” Instead, “It’s a destabilizing organization by any common-sense standard. This wouldn’t happen without the support of Iran and Syria.”

I asked him what he meant with all this emphasis on electoral and patronage reform. He said the U.S. should help the Lebanese government deliver better services to the Shiites “to peel support away from Hezbollah” and encourage the local populace to “view them as an oppressive force.” The U.S. should “find a mechanism whereby the disaffected have an effective outlet for their grievances, which assures them they are getting social services.”

The U.S. needs a foreign policy that “looks at the root causes of problems and dangers.” Obama compared Hezbollah to Hamas. Both need to be compelled to understand that “they’re going down a blind alley with violence that weakens their legitimate claims.” He knows these movements aren’t going away anytime soon (“Those missiles aren’t going to dissolve”), but “if they decide to shift, we’re going to recognize that. That’s an evolution that should be recognized.”

Obama being Obama, he understood the broader reason I was asking about Lebanon. Everybody knows that Obama is smart (and he was quite well informed about Lebanon). The question is whether he’s seasoned and tough enough to deal with implacable enemies.

“The debate we’re going to be having with John McCain is how do we understand the blend of military action to diplomatic action that we are going to undertake,” he said. “I constantly reject this notion that any hint of strategies involving diplomacy are somehow soft or indicate surrender or means that you are not going to crack down on terrorism. Those are the terms of debate that have led to blunder after blunder.” more

Obama's Blueprint for Change
Obama’s Advisers
Obama’s Team
Obama’s Foreign Policy Brain Trust

No Drama Obama

his even temper, which has been tested for sure, would go a long way in a foreign policy crisis says an aide. indeed. obama is widely underestimated:

It’s this matter of temperament,” said Gen. Merrill “Tony” McPeak, who has been campaigning for the Illinois senator for months and labeled him “steady, reliable, ‘No Shock Barack,’ ‘No Drama Obama.’”

It was the latest in the back-and-forth between Obama and Clinton, a New York senator and former first lady, who have been sparring over who is most qualified to take charge of U.S. foreign policy. The two are locked in a fight to become the Democratic nominee to vie in November against Republican John McCain.

McCain has joined Clinton in arguing that the first-term Illinois senator lacks enough seasoning in world affairs.

Clinton’s campaign has run a television commercial depicting sleeping children and a ringing telephone at the White House to raise doubts about Obama’s credentials to handle a “3 a.m.” crisis phone call.

McPeak, who was chief of the U.S. Air Force during the first Gulf War in 1991, touted Obama’s foreign policy abilities at a news conference in Chicago where the candidate was flanked by several generals and admirals who support him.

McPeak drew from the experiences of the campaign trail to make his point that Obama would be a steady hand in a crisis.
read more.

here's a prime example of his even temper. despite clinton's ongoing shenanigans, he doesn't ever degrade her:

AP: Obama said he did not think the Clinton campaign was deliberately stirring racial divisions. He said, however, "I do think that the Clinton campaign has talked more during the course of the last few months about what groups are supporting her and what groups are supporting me, and trying to make the case that the reason she should be the nominee is there are a set of voters that Obama might not get. That seems to track certain racial demographics. And I disagree with that."

Obama said some voters might favor or disfavor him because he is black, just as some might favor or disfavor Clinton because she is female.

However, he said, "the overwhelming majority of Americans are going to make these decisions based on who they think will be the best president. I have absolute confidence that if I'm doing my job, if I'm delivering my message, then there are very few voters out there that I can't win."

"If I'm not winning them over," he said, "then it's my fault."

Who Can Beat McCain?

Colin Powell Advising Obama

excerpt from salon: Obama has also surrounded himself with capable and respected foreign policy advisors, including seeking advice from a preeminent and forceful U.S. negotiator, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, whose reputation overseas is less sullied than it is back home. With foreign policy, there is no indication Obama will give away the store or, contrary to what his opponents might charge, that he will be a Chamberlain-like appeaser.

Rather, a President Obama will likely engage the world in the way it should be engaged -- with respect, understanding and a clear sense of purpose. He will be, at the very least, a symbol of what can restore greatness to America -- a greatness that millions of people outside America want to believe in, but have up until now had difficulty reconciling with the facts. From their perspective, if a black son-of-an-immigrant with a Muslim name can become an American president, then anything truly is possible in America. And that's a country that would be very hard to be enemies with.

samantha power, one of obama's foreign policy advisers.
there is a stark contrast between obama's foreign policy and clinton's, according to foreign policy in focus.

clinton's advisers are the same as bill clinton's and her policy is more aligned with bush. read on.

Senator Clinton’s foreign policy advisors tend to be veterans of President Bill Clinton’s administration, most notably former secretary of state Madeleine Albright and former National Security Adviser Sandy Berger. Her most influential advisor - and her likely choice for Secretary of State - is Richard Holbrooke. Holbrooke served in a number of key roles in her husband’s administration, including U.S. ambassador to the UN and member of the cabinet, special emissary to the Balkans, assistant secretary of state for European and Canadian affairs, and U.S. ambassador to Germany. He also served as President Jimmy Carter’s assistant secretary of state for East Asia in propping up Marcos in the Philippines, supporting Suharto’s repression in East Timor, and backing the generals behind the Kwangju massacre in South Korea.

Senator Barack Obama’s foreign policy advisers, who on average tend to be younger than those of the former first lady, include mainstream strategic analysts who have worked with previous Democratic administrations, such as former national security advisors Zbigniew Brzezinski and Anthony Lake, former assistant secretary of state Susan Rice, and former navy secretary Richard Danzig. They have also included some of the more enlightened and creative members of the Democratic Party establishment, such as Joseph Cirincione and Lawrence Korb of the Center for American Progress, and former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke. His team also includes the noted human rights scholar and international law advocate Samantha Power - author of a recent New Yorker article on U.S. manipulation of the UN in post-invasion Iraq - and other liberal academics. Some of his advisors, however, have particularly poor records on human rights and international law, such as retired General Merrill McPeak, a backer of Indonesia’s occupation of East Timor, and Dennis Ross, a supporter of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank.

Contrasting Issues
While some of Obama’s key advisors, like Larry Korb, have expressed concern at the enormous waste from excess military spending, Clinton’s advisors have been strong supporters of increased resources for the military.
While Obama advisors Susan Rice and Samantha Power have stressed the importance of U.S. multilateral engagement, Albright allies herself with the jingoism of the Bush administration, taking the attitude that “If we have to use force, it is because we are America! We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall, and we see further into the future.”
While Susan Rice has emphasized how globalization has led to uneven development that has contributed to destabilization and extremism and has stressed the importance of bottom-up anti-poverty programs, Berger and Albright have been outspoken supporters of globalization on the current top-down neo-liberal lines.

Obama advisors like Joseph Cirincione have emphasized a policy toward Iraq based on containment and engagement and have downplayed the supposed threat from Iran. Clinton advisor Holbrooke, meanwhile, insists that "the Iranians are an enormous threat to the United States,” the country is “the most pressing problem nation,” and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is like Hitler.

Iraq as Key Indicator
Perhaps the most important difference between the two foreign policy teams concerns Iraq. Given the similarities in the proposed Iraq policies of Senator Hillary Clinton and Senator Barack Obama, Obama’s supporters have emphasized that their candidate had the better judgment in opposing the invasion beforehand. Indeed, in the critical months prior to the launch of the war in 2003, Obama openly challenged the Bush administration’s exaggerated claims of an Iraqi threat and presciently warned that a war would lead to an increase in Islamic extremism, terrorism, and regional instability, as well as a decline in America’s standing in the world.

Senator Clinton, meanwhile, was repeating as fact the administration’s false claims of an imminent Iraqi threat. She voted to authorize President Bush to invade that oil-rich country at the time and circumstances of his own choosing and confidently predicted success. Despite this record and Clinton’s refusal to apologize for her war authorization vote, however, her supporters argue that it no longer relevant and voters need to focus on the present and future.

Indeed, whatever choices the next president makes with regard to Iraq are going to be problematic, and there are no clear answers at this point. Yet one’s position regarding the invasion of Iraq at that time says a lot about how a future president would address such questions as the use of force, international law, relations with allies, and the use of intelligence information.

As a result, it may be significant that Senator Clinton’s foreign policy advisors, many of whom are veterans of her husband’s administration, were virtually all strong supporters of President George W. Bush’s call for a U.S. invasion of Iraq. By contrast, almost every one of Senator Obama’s foreign policy team was opposed to a U.S. invasion. fpif