NDN Blog

The Times has a good piece this morning on the iPhone. Compares it to other current devices, and has an honest discussion about the one thing we are all wondering about - will this new keyboard they've come up with work?

All sorts of stories today about the Republican divisions that are preventing the nation from moving ahead on immigration reform.  We wrote about our disapointment with the President last Friday, and are glad to see him putting his head down and trying to bring his Party along.  But the quotes in this Post story from the GOP resisters - DeMint, Sessions and co - are not encouraging.....

And in the Times today, Sec. Chertoff seems to warm to the idea of adding a "touchback" provision for the undocumented immigrants to apply for their "Z" visa.  Talk like this needs to end.  Despite winning the elections and winning this debate with the American people, Democrats have bent over backwards to accomodate a rash of new and sometimes crazy demands from the GOP (the two year guest worker model, and the point system among them).  Senators Kennedy and his team have demonstrated a tremendous willingness to deal, to bring a reluctant GOP along even when the country and common sense doesn't support it.  Harry Reid was correct last week to declare "enough."  The slew of GOP amendments being offered on the floor - when they were in fact offered - were making the bill worse, and in some cases, just plain stupid.  The process was out of control and needed to be stopped. 

Democrats have given as much ground as they can and should give.  Senator Kennedy needs to shut down talk of things like making 12 million go back to home their countries to apply for their visas.   It is impractical, we do not have the infrastructure to pull it off, and it will lead to most of the undocumented immigrants just staying put, defeating the main reason for this reform.  If the bill comes back up next week, as we hope it will, it cannot contain any new concessions by Senator Kennedy, and the GOP needs to be told clearly what kind of amendments are permissible.  A bright line needs to be drawn, and if crossed, Senator Reid needs to once again pull the bill. 

The behavior of the Republican Party these last two years on this issue has been shameful.  I applaud the President for stepping in, but as Yoda said: "Do or not do. There is no try."  It is about getting this thing done now, Mr. President.  It is not about looking good trying.  

Yesterday's Washington Post had a remarkable piece about a new strategy to arms the Sunni militias in Iraq.  I will admit being a little skeptical about this plan, but in the current issue of Democracy Carter Malkasian makes a compelling case for why this new strategy may be one worth giving serious consideration to.  He ends his article this way (and I hope you read the whole thing):

Neither the insurgency nor AQI [Al Qaeda in Iraq] can be defeated if Al Anbar is not secured. Unfortunately, the Iraqi Army appears unlikely to do so. The widely accepted recommendation to invest more advisers, training, or equipment will not change the ethnicity of the Iraqi Army, lessen sectarian tensions, or reverse popular disaffection with the government. Even more preposterous is the idea that expediting U.S. withdrawal will somehow enable the army to provide security. Perhaps the Iraqi government could massively reinforce the Iraqi Army and crush the Sunnis but, considering the strength of the insurgency, this could only be accomplished through wanton brutality, which would have prohibitive domestic and international political ramifications for the United States, as well as destabilizing repercussions throughout the region.

Given the likelihood of continued ethnic conflict, the United States needs to look to limited means of protecting its interests in Iraq. First and foremost, that means constraining AQI’s influence. Pursuing a grassroots Iraqization in which greater effort is placed on developing local police forces–throughout the Sunni provinces–could allow the areas that enjoy relatively restricted insurgent activity to be expanded, thereby constraining AQI’s influence. In contrast to the Iraqi Army, local Sunni forces can control territory, collect intelligence, and cripple AQI–precisely what the United States needs as it looks to draw down its forces. To start, the Iraqi Ministry of Interior must expand police recruitment and, as training capacity permits, lift caps on personnel numbers. Additionally, the United States needs to put as much effort into training, advising, and equipping the police as the army. In particular, the quality of the advisory teams working with the police should be improved. Like the army, the best active-duty Marines and soldiers ought to be embedded with the police.

But these are the simple actions. The U.S. and Iraqi governments need to go further and empower local Sunni leaders, as they did with the Albu Mahal and Sittar in Al Anbar province. Local Sunni leaders should be given the power and authority to motivate their communities to join and support the police. Imams, sheiks, and other local leaders need to be lavished with political and economic rewards, to be distributed to their communities, for supporting the police: political positions, command of military formations, civil affairs projects, economic compensation packages, salaries, and permission to run black-market activities. There will, of course, be corruption as local leaders take money and profits for themselves. In Iraq, that is the cost of doing business.

Such a policy may sound like a minor technical change, but it would actually be a fundamental shift in U.S. strategy. It would undermine America’s key strategic goals of forming a democracy and a unified state. The United States would be tacitly permitting Sunnis to field militias and defend themselves. This would be one more step toward the fragmentation of Iraq into Sunni, Shia, and Kurdish areas. Indeed, a real possibility exists that Sunni police would clash with Shia militias in defense of their neighborhoods. Additionally, the government would be devolving power from democratically elected officials to traditional nonelected authority figures, such as imams and sheiks, which could further undermine the democratization effort.

These downsides are undeniable, but they should not be exaggerated. National unity would probably be no more weakened than it is now, and fighting between the government and Sunni police outside Baghdad is unlikely. In fact, Sunni police forces have a better relationship with the Iraqi government than any other element of Sunni society, and there are no cases of Sunni police from Al Anbar attacking Shia areas. The Iraqi Army and local Sunni police regularly conduct combined operations against AQI. Sittar has even openly proposed cooperation with Shia tribes. Similarly, the Iraqi government is not set against working with Sunnis; the fact that Maliki has backed local Sunni forces suggests that he does not view them as a threat. The risk of clashes with Shia militias could be mitigated by not forming Sunni police within Baghdad.

Ultimately, the United States faces a choice. It can continue to push a national and unified state, and risk letting hardcore insurgents and terrorists go unchallenged. Or the ties that bind the state can be loosened to counter AQI with local police forces, but at the cost of formalizing sectarian divisions and weakening democratization. The latter is hardly optimal, but optimal is no longer a luxury the United States can afford. Right now, we must focus on avoiding the worst possible outcome, and that means doing what we can to prevent AQI from having uncontested control over the Sunni provinces. Grassroots Iraqization would accomplish that goal, and hopefully, the local forces that are empowered through this strategy one day could contribute to producing a peaceful and stable Iraq.

The Times this morning has a story that suggests the immigration bill is still alive and kicking. Importantly it quotes the leading Senate R, John Kyl, admiting responsibility for the reckless actions of the anti-immigration deal gang of 4 who were instrumental in bringing the deal down last week.

On a relatied note, thoughtful Post columnist Sebastian Mallaby starts his column, "The Party of Global Seriousness" this way:

I strongly believe that any successful path forward in Iraq and the Middle East will require a strategic coming to terms with the newfound complexity of the region's ancient battle between Sunni and Shiite that was fundamentally altered by our installation of the first Shiite-led Arab government in the history of the region. It is clear, in retrospect, that despite intelligence warnings, the leaders of our government simply didn't understand what they were doing in Iraq, and had no real idea of what was going after to happen after the initial and successful acts of our military.

A big and important piece in the Times today details our latest efforts to gain the upper hand in this new complex regional dynamic - our government is now arming Sunni militias in Iraq. Of course, Sunni militias have killed more American troops than any other force in Iraq, and they the sworn enemies of the Shiite-led Maliki government. Confused? I think, my friends, so is our government.

Consider these graphs near the end of the story:

General Lynch said American commanders would face hard decisions in choosing which groups to support. “This isn’t a black and white place,” he said. “There are good guys and bad guys and there are groups in between,” and separating them was a major challenge. He said some groups that had approached the Americans had made no secret of their enmity.

“They say, ‘We hate you because you are occupiers’ ” he said, “ ‘but we hate Al Qaeda worse, and we hate the Persians even more.’ ” Sunni militants refer to Iraq’s Shiites as Persians, a reference to the strong links between Iraqi Shiites and the Shiites who predominate in Iran.

An Iraqi government official who was reached by telephone on Sunday said the government was uncomfortable with the American negotiations with the Sunni groups because they offered no guarantee that the militias would be loyal to anyone other than the American commander in their immediate area. “The government’s aim is to disarm and demobilize the militias in Iraq,” said Sadiq al-Rikabi, a political adviser to Mr. Maliki. “And we have enough militias in Iraq that we are struggling now to solve the problem. Why are we creating new ones?”

In a major op-ed in the Post today, Henry Kissinger joins the global chorus begging the Administration to start putting more effort and faith in a regional political reconciliation process that really is the only possible way we can improve a battle with the kind of complex politics described above (sorry for no link here - couldn't find it on the Post site this am).

LA Times writer Ron Brownstein has an interesting piece today, The National Audition, which reflects on how the new Democratic Presidential primary calendar will make this a very different election year. 

I have a few quotes in the story and spent a long time with Brownstein talking through all this.  The basic case I try to make is that we are seeing an explosion of citizen involvement in our politics, something healthy and good for the nation.  The new primary system, though it is not perfect, is allowing all regions of the country to participate in the important job of picking a President, something the old system - at least in recent years - did not allow, accelerating this transformation to a new post-broadcast people-powered politics. 

It's worth taking a look at the piece.  It raises all sorts of interesting questions. 

Several good stories this morning.

The Times takes the GOP to task for their over the top efforts to kill the immigration bill.

A Jim Rutenberg piece makes the case Bush is now officially a lame duck, echoing many of the themes from our essay yesterday. Dan Balz makes a similar case, but doesn't go as far. I have a modest quote in there.

While I agree with the sentiment expressed by many these last few days that we must shoulder on, we also must not be niave. A handful of Republican Senators went to extraordinary lenghts these last few weeks to undermine the broad and deep bi-partisan coalition behind immigration reform. It would be wise for those advocating reform to work out in advance a strategy for dealing with the incredible opposition in a narrow slice of the Republican Party. No more compromises, no more bending over backwards. The reformers have been reasonable, The opposition anything but. The reformers need now to not only be fair, but tough. The American people, common sense, and history is on their side. They can no longer allow the outrageous politics of a narrow few hold the rest of the nation hostage. But that will require a change in the way this fight has been conducted.

Matt Bai has the cover story in this week's NY Times Magazine.  It looks at the debate about poverty, and features John Edwards. 

We also learn the title of his book due out later this summer, “The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics."

After the collapse of the immigration bill last night, I could only really think of the President and his legacy. Immigration reform has been something that he could do that would leave behind something lasting, something permanent, something that as he traveled around the nation in his post-Presidential years he could look on with joy and pride. But even now that looks doubtful, and with that, it is increasingly likely that he will go down in history as one of the worst leaders our nation has ever had.

Consider what we will be discussing and writing about for posterity: a drop in the standard of living for average Americans; the creation of structural budget deficits coming right before the fiscal time bomb of the retirement of the boomers; a decline in our rates of broadband penetration relative to the rest of the world; more without health insurance, in poverty and with dangerous levels of household debt; rising crimes rates; an education reform approach underfunded by tens of billions of dollars; a weakening of our support for trade liberalization; a shifting of the tax burden from the wealthy to the middle class; an era of what has been perhaps unmatched corruption, lying and betrayal of the public trust; a weakening of our long-cherished civil liberties, including the suspension of habeas corpus for non US citizens; the publicly sanctioned demonization of Hispanics, the fastest growing part of the American family; and of course there is the great one, Iraq, and our incredible tossing away of the opportunity to remake the world in a way true to our values after 9/11 when the whole world was with us.

What will also be discussed are not just the mistakes, but the challenges not met. The lack of action on the decline of the middle class, on climate change, on energy independence, on college tuition costs; on giving our workers and kids 21st century skills; on offering a plan to give more people health insurance and good and affordable care; on Darfur. To paraphrase Tom Friedman this was not only a disappointing age for what was done, but also disappointing in the lack of imagination shown by our leaders in finding ways to solve the tough emerging challenges facing our nation and the world.

So, Mr. President, this morning we add one more item to this terrible legacy - the inability to fix our broken immigration system.

Somehow I thought that given the coming judgment of history, Mr. Bush would rise, drag his reluctant Party to the table, and end his time here with a powerful and moral act - bringing these 12 million out of the shadows - that would make it much more difficult for history to break against him. But this morning, even on an issue he believes in so deeply, he couldn't get it done, and we are now one more day closer to having his time here in Washington be judged as an extraordinary failure of leadership, character, judgment and governance.

Perhaps things will change in the coming weeks, and the President and the reluctant Republicans will wake from their slumber and find common ground with the Democrats. I hope so, and we at NDN will continue to work as if something good can come from the disappointing outcome last night on the floor of the Senate.

As you know, NDN has been at the forefront of a national effort to imagine and build a progressive infrastructure capable of doing battle on the new emerging battleground of the 21st century.    This month we celebrate the 1st anniversary of the founding of an important new piece of this emerging infrastructure, Democracy: A Journal of Ideas.  This compelling new journal was founded by two good friends of ours, Kenneth Baer and Andrei Cherny, and has been supported by NDN from its inception.

You can learn more about Democracy by visiting their web site at www.democracyjournal.org. 

Democracy was launched to be the progressive analogue of the idea journals on the conservative side – such as Public Interest, National Interest, and Commentary – that have been the original source of many of the big ideas the right wing used to appeal to Americans over the past 30 years. And it has had a very strong first year. Democracy’s readership has shot up to more than that of Public Interest at its peak during the Reagan years.  The journal can be found in major bookstores in 49 states – in places like Gulfport, Mississippi and Anchorage, Alaska – on shelves where conservative journals used to have all the space for themselves. It has subscribers on every continent, and is finding its way into libraries across the nation.

Most importantly, Democracy is a crucial part of creating the intellectual underpinnings of the next wave of progressive action.  They feature thoughtful groundbreaking pieces from established thinkers such as Joseph Nye, Jr., Peter Bergen, Dennis Ross, and Elaine Kamarck as well as up-and-coming writers. This is why they have been featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, and on hundreds of blog posts over the past year.  Maureen Dowd wrote that Democracy is “a progressive journal to ponder big ideas that might help the wretched Democrats stop driving on Ambien and snatch back a little power.”  Not exactly how I would have said it but you get the idea.   

In honor of Democracy’s first anniversary, NDN has arranged for a special subscription discount for our members and friends of $24 for the entire year.   I hope you will help us celebrate their anniversary by subscribing – and supporting – this very worthwhile venture today.