OBAMA, HERALD OF CHANGE: In the words of the certainly-not-conservative Jeffrey Rosen, Barack Obama is trying to split the difference on torture. He wants to move forward–no messy dwelling on the Bush-Cheney era–except that he’ll look backward if forced. There will be no independent commission to hold top-ranking officials politically accountable. But, if Attorney General Eric Holder wants to prosecute the Bush lawyers who defended the legality of waterboarding–John Yoo, Jay...

Details here. For a solid look at the case’s background, go here. Both pieces are the good work of Eli Lake. Cross-posted at Conventional Folly

On Sunday morning, the White House sent out its swine flu truth squad to hit all the major Sunday talk shows, including Meet the Press, This Week and Fox News Sunday. The truth squad was clearly desperate to avoid any questions about Joe Biden and his apocalyptic warning this week that no one should travel in trains or planes, lest they catch the swine flu. On Meet the Press, David Gregory asked one question about Biden, but let Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano off easy, after Napolitano...

Gen. Michael Hayden, former director of the CIA, walked a fine line this past Sunday on the question of whether waterboarding is torture. His message seemed to be, “I know it’s wrong. I’m proud I stopped it. It may be torture. But in this charged partisan environment, I’m not going to say that explicitly.” Check it out: WALLACE: One of the concerns about the memos is the lengths to which the Justice Department went to justify some of the techniques. I want to put...

Gen. Michael Hayden, former director of the CIA, says ‘yes’. I think his argument is on very weak ground. Here’s Hayden on Fox this past Sunday: [CHRIS] WALLACE: And you [told the White House] this would be a grave threat to national security to… HAYDEN: I probably didn’t use those words, but I marshaled the arguments as to why I thought it would make America less safe. WALLACE: Now, we should point out that you were CIA director starting in 2006, which means that...

I’m trying to get my head around both the recently released memos and the issue as a whole. I believe that torture is wrong and that it doesn’t work. But what if I believed that torture did work? That is a question of evidence, not ethics. If it worked, how much risk to American lives would I tolerate in order to defend my ethical commitment? An editorial in today’s Post slams the Bush administration for its constant use of waterboarding in the interrogations of Khalid Sheik...

My knowledge of our healthcare system is basically limited to my own experience as a patient. The actual health care has been quite good. But my experience with health insurance has been pretty awful, mostly because I’ve spent time at three universities and two different jobs over the past several years. Right now, I have insurance through COBRA, which means I still have insurance through my previous employer, but have to cover my employer’s share of the cost. Basically, I’m...

That is certainly the conventional wisdom. Elliott Abrams dissents. For him, anti-settlement advocacy is a distraction. Abrams writes that the expansion of the Israeli settler population basically entails population growth in existing settlements, which will become part of Israel under the expected terms of any two-state deal. What Abrams is against is taking new land for settlements: Israeli settlement expansion beyond the security fence, in areas Israel will ultimately evacuate, is a mistake:...

The Foreign Policy Initiative held its first public event on Tuesday, a conference entitled Afghanistan: Planning for Success. The FPI board of directors consists of Bob Kagan, Bill Kristol and Dan Senor, leading many to the natural conclusion that FPI is a neocon initiative. That’s not unreasonable, but where the neocon-watchers go wrong is their immediate attribution of belligerent nastiness to such an effort. For example, George Packer writes of Kristol, Kagan & Co., If you didn’t...

It’s the old nature vs. nurture debate. Is intelligence genetic, or does your upbringing matter? Yesterday, the Times reviewed a new book that makes the case for nurture. This comment from the reviewer caught my eye: When the evidence is ambiguous, it is all the easier for ideology to influence one’s scientific judgment. Liberals hope that social policy can redress life’s unfairness. Conservatives hold that natural inequality must be accepted as inevitable. Actually, I think conservatives...

Craig Mullaney, my classmate from grad school, is at #10 on the NY Times bestseller list for hardcover non-fiction (for the second week in a row). His book, The Unforgiving Minute, is the story of his time at West Point, Oxford, and Afghanistan. If you need some persuasion to part with your money, check out Vanity Fair’s excerpt from the book, about Craig’s boxing match in Afghanistan. Cross-posted at Conventional Folly

On Monday night, Maddow invited counterinsurgency expert John Nagl to discuss Afghanistan in her ‘Talk Me Down’ segment. Nagl is a retired lieutenant colonel who commanded an Army battalion in Baghdad and wrote Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife, an influential analysis of American failures in Vietnam. In addition, Nagl worked with David Petraeus on Field Manual 3-24, the Army’s official doctrine for counterinsurgency, which informed the surge. Currently, Nagl serves as President...

THANK YOU, NEW YORK TIMES: I’ve got to give credit where credit is due. Yesterday’s front-page story about Obama’s health care plans is a remarkable vindication of what McCain was saying about healthcare last fall. The Times’ story captures just how dishonest Obama’s attacks really were. I can tell you as a veteran of the McCain policy shop just how angry and frustrated we were by those attacks, which were repeated night after night in tens of millions of dollars...

THANK YOU, DAVID GREGORY: Yes, this is the second post in a row to pick on Christina Romer, head of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers. But this exchange was too good to pass up: MR. GREGORY: There’s an effort across the administration to sound more confident about the economy. The president, speaking on Friday, said this: (Videotape, Friday) PRES. OBAMA: If we are keeping focused on all the fundamentally sound aspects of our economy, then we’re going to get through...

Dr. Christina Romer is the chair of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers. Her comments yesterday morning on Meet the Press left me rather unsettled about the administration’s readiness to handle this crisis, because I sincerely want the economy to recover as soon as possible. But seriously, should you believe a Republican who says a rapid recovery is what he truly wants, when you know that he secretly hopes the recovery will be delayed just long enough to ensure that Barack...

Al Jazeera English: A delegation of senior Middle Eastern leaders has travelled to Sudan to express international support for Omar al-Bashir, the Sudanese president, who is accused of war crimes in Darfur. Officials from Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah joined Syria’s parliament speaker and the leader of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad group for talks with al-Bashir in Khartoum, Sudan’s capital, on Friday. Don’t forget that the victims of Bashir’s genocide in Sudan are Muslims. A...

If God is good, why does evil exist? Do men have free will, or are our actions predetermined? Above all, why don’t hotels ever put little tubes of toothpaste in your bathroom? The hotel I just stayed in had little bottles of mouthwash, shampoo, body lotion, conditioner and several bars of soap. Clearly, the issue isn’t money. Is the anti-toothpaste lobby getting in the way? Does toothpaste cause global warming? I dunno. I learned my lesson a long time ago. Bring your own damn toothpaste. Cross-posted...

I’m posting in San Francisco right now, after spending the past couple of days at a Stanford conference on democratic transitions and the role that international actors play in supporting them. I presented a paper on the South Korean transition to democracy in 1987, co-authored with a colleague from Seoul. If you’re into the academic literature on democratic transitions, you may have noticed that it rarely even asks whether international actors play a significant role. The exception...

BLACK PRESIDENTS BEFORE OBAMA: A brilliant study of fictional black presidents by Sean Higgins, courtesy of Doublethink Online. If Eric Holder read this article before giving his “cowardice” speech, he might have saved himself a lot of embarrassment. Cross-posted at Conventional Folly

Ron Paul at CPAC: “We now have moved a major step in the direction of socialism,” Rep. Ron Paul (Tex.) said Friday, adding: “We are close to a fascist system where the government has control of our lives and our economy.” It sounds funny, but when you think about, the full name of the Nazi Party was the National Socialist German Workers Party. Who says fascists can’t be socialists, too? Anyhow, not surprisingly, the WaPo’s coverage of CPAC amounted to a compilation...

I just saw Slumdog for the first time last night. A truly deserving winner, IMHO. Also, a good moment to reflect on the flourishing relationship between the US and India. Asia is one part of the world where even Democrats say George Bush did a very good job. As Dan Twining observes, Dubya’s most important achievement in Asia was the firm establishment of a strategic partnership with India. Then why, Dan asks, does the Obama administration seem so uninterested in India? Why wasn’t...

Hat tip: Matt Yglesias

In light of the kind words I had for Bobby Jindal earlier in the week, I thought I should weigh in on his response to the President’s address. It hurts to say it, but the speech was awful. It was a lost opportunity of epic proportions, unequaled since… Bill Clinton’s awful nomination speech at the 1988 Democratic Convention. The speech was so long and so boring that the entirely Democratic crowd cheered when Clinton finally said “In conclusion…” Rising star....

Within the space of 24 hours, both men have elaborated their thoughts on how to turn around the war in Afghanistan. In short, they disagree. As a former McCain staffer, I’m no impartial judge, but I think I can make a pretty compelling case for why McCain’s approach is better. The foundation of McCain’s approach is the core principle of counterinsurgency doctrine: secure the population. As he explained it in his speech yesterday at AEI, Effective counterterrorism operations rely,...

The Israelis had GPS units placed in almost all of Hezbollah’s vehicles by a high-ranking Hezbollah official. Correspondent Mitchell Prothero tells the story in The National (UAE). Now, if I just read that story in a random Persian Gulf paper, I would assume it’s fiction. But Andrew Exum vouches for Prothero, and interviewed him about the story. [Correction:] Prothero is a US Army veteran [journalist] with extensive experience [reporting on the US Army] in Iraq. Israeli history buffs...