Avuncular American

Paying Them To Be Pals

Do you remember the scene in David Lean's epic film, Lawrence of Arabia, where Colonel TE Lawrence, to shouts of "Aurens! Aurens!" rides back to his Bedouin allies in the company of... mercenaries?  "Killers, cutthroats," say the disgusted princes and tribal leaders.  Lawrence has bought himself some protection, but at the cost of the respect of those who are fighting with him for a cause.

A century later, we have lots of modern-day Lawrences in Army and Marine camouflage BDUs, mingling in the Middle East and hiking the Hindu Kush, alternately fighting and tea-drinking with the various bands that make up Iraq and Afghanistan's warring factions.  In Lean's film, it was Ottoman gold that inspired some of Lawrence's Arab allies.  Nowadays, it's more likely to be the shrinking US dollar, shrink-wrapped in bricks of $100 bills.

When I read that the Pentagon's budget is now to include CERP ("Commander's Emergency Response Program") money to woo the Taliban over to "our side," that image of Lawrence's mercenaries looms up.  The $1.3 billion allotted to CERP in Afghanistan may be a drop in the bucket, but as with all such things, has there been much thought given to what happens when the former baddies stop getting money?

Read Shane Bauer's great expose in the September Mother Jones, "The Sheikh Down," for a look at what your money buys in Iraq, where CERP payments created the "Awakening Councils" out of former enemies among the Sunni population.  It's an entertaining read, except the part about the shaking down of the American taxpayer, who gets to pay for "reconstruction" projects at many times their justified price, all in the name of keeping the peace.  Getting a piece, for the sheikhs profiled, is more like it.

But what happens when the money stops?  Surely even Pentagon planners can harbor hopes of a rosy future of declining budget lines when the CERP program "sunsets," to use a term from accounting-speak?  But will the Sunni fighters in Iraq and the ex-Taliban pocketing the payments understand it when the CERP paymasters say "Thanks guys, but our funding has zeroed-out."  Their guns and bombs, bought and paid for by American largess - who will they point them at now?

How about allegations that Italian payments to the Taliban for peace in their sector, when stopped and not communicated to French forces that inherited their zone, subsequently brought the Taliban's wrath on the unsuspecting French?  According to the Times of London, even the US Embassy in Rome protested to the Italian government about such practices.  But now the same thing is in the Pentagon budget?

Tom Engelhardt's "Tomgram" put it squarely: "Will Today's US-Armed Ally Be Tomorrow's Enemy?"  We've been there before, in the self-same Afghanistan:

Let me suggest just one lesson that seems to be on no one else's mind at a moment when a key "option" being offered in Washington -- especially by Democrats not eager to see tens of thousands more U.S. troops heading Afghanistan-wards -- is to arm and "train" ever more thousands of Afghans into a vast army and police security force for a government that hardly exists. Based on the last three decades in the region, don't you think that we should pause and consider who exactly we may be arming and who exactly we may be supporting, and whether, given those 30 years of history, we have the slightest idea what we're doing?

Americans with amnesia should go out and rent Charlie Wilson's War, a slick rendition of how we "bought" the Mujahideen those thirty years ago, who then became the Taliban, who then started getting CERP payments...

Israel's Long Straw, Palestine's Trickle

The Biblical "land of milk and honey" and the "wilderness" of the holy book are one and the same.  There's the freshwater Sea of Galilee, the saltwater Dead Sea (getting deader by the minute), and the Jordan River in between.  There is rocky desert, chaparral, and the occasional verdant spring.

Until the rampant development of urban Israel, suburban Israeli settlements on occupied Arab land, and the increasing gerrymandering, walling off, and bypass-roading of what is left of "Palestine" thanks to the Oslo Accords, there was basically enough water.  Enough even to build a swimming pool in the then sleepy West Bank town of Ramallah, where I went in 1972 to dig its foundations out of solid rock.  Even during those early years of The Occupation, Israelis and Palestinians managed to share the region's precious water resources.

"Share" is a word that would be difficult to justify in the current circumstances.  Today's release by Amnesty International of its damning "Troubled Waters" report elicited a predictable official Israeli response, essentially saying "Water? ...what water problem?"  After denying there is a problem, the Israeli MFA, in a reaction that is remarkable for its brevity and chutzpah, goes on to say that if there is a problem, it's the Palestinians own fault.  For a more realistic account, see the BBC's report from Gaza.

Better yet, watch "Drying Up Palestine," the short documentary film on how Israel has been sucking on a long straw, digging deep under future Palestinian independent territory and depriving currently-occupied Palestinians and future "independent" Palestinians of one of the very requisites of statehood: water resources.  Maybe Peter Snowdon and Rima Essa's film (you can see a clip here) should be up on the Amnesty site.

Image: AppleWorks clip art.

The White Ribbon... of Innocence, Lost

Das Weiße Band (image from official website)

"Strange events happen in a small village in northern Germany..." as one capsule review has it, would make you think that Michael Haneke's Das Weiße Band (The White Ribbon in international release) is another M. Night Shyamalan clone.  No disrespect to Mr. S., but this is anything but a German-language "The Village."  Haneke, you see, has won the Cannes Golden Palm for his efforts.

And those efforts are considerable.  Haneke, talking to Le Soir's Fabienne Bradfer, said that he's wanted to make this film for the last ten years, but he's never had enough money until his 2005 French suspense hit Caché.  Think of Caché and its atmosphere of intermittent tension, unexplained incidents, and moments of high emotion and you will get a sense of The White Ribbon's Weltanschauung.

The pre-World War I setting, rendered in a black-and-white that is stunning for its clarity even when illuminated by a candle, is lovingly rendered, though this is not, repeat not, a period costume drama.  The choice of B&W seems natural, for it helps, along with all those females with their hair pulled back in tight buns, seemingly from the age of five, to recreate the atmosphere of a society living the last months of an era that we know now only from rare documentary footage.  Just as the (controversial) use of color in the recent WW II French documentary series Apocalypse made 70 year old footage of people come alive, the use of B&W in Das Weiße Band "helps the viewer enter the film" as Haneke says.

I won't go into those "strange events" since I hate it when reviewers tell you the plot line.  But I will say this: whoever still harbors illusions of rural society as an idyllic haven from the violence of the city may find The White Ribbon a disturbing revelation.  But if Haneke's film is a metaphor for the latent violence in humanity - even amongst its youngest members - then there are plenty of harbingers of the horrors to come when the little terrors grow up to be the adults of the Third Reich.

An American GI performing occupation/de-Nazification duties in postwar Germany once said that he used to be incapable of looking at people without his first thought being "I wonder what s/he did during the war."  As you watch Haneke's film, you know that the 20th century's World Wars (separated by barely a generation) are looming ahead, and you find yourself wondering "what will little Martin be up to 20 years hence?"

This is what Haneke wants us to do: "I ask questions... [and I ask myself] what can I do to give the greatest freedom to the audience?"  Part of that freedom is not being given tidy endings, or explanations for what we have just watched for the last 144 minutes, riveted to our seats.  But that's the way the villagers would want it too.  The omerta that reigns over the pristine square and well-tended fields hides many secrets, and the onset of the war that ended the barony, toppled the Kaiser, and set the seeds for the even greater slaughter of World War II comes - I almost hate to say it - as a relief.

The villagers might just say that it allowed them to change the subject, away from their obsessions over those "strange events."  Those of us who see The White Ribbon might not shake its effect so easily.

Kafka, Or the Half-Life of Black Lists

Brussels was the venue for a very important human rights conference this past week, but it took place in an academic setting, out of the spotlight but hopefully not entirely unnoticed.

ULB’s October 20 conference, “Terrorism Lists, Executive Powers, and Human Rights,” organized by the European Centre for Constitutional & Human Rights” (ECCHR), aimed very high. It gathered internationally-known jurists from academia and the human rights community, but also “practitioners” from both sides of the bar.

The day-long program started with a debate, Gilles de Kerchove, the EU Counter-Terrorism Coordinator versus Mark Muller QC, Chair of the prestigious UK-based Bar Human Rights Committee (BHRC). De Kerchove garnered general admiration for his willingness to appear before a generally critical audience, before which speaker after speaker denounced the politicization of justice represented by the widespread creation, post 9/11, of no-fly lists. Muller stressed the disproportionate impact on open exile groups, whose freedom of expression has been hard hit by the blacklisting by EU member states, often simply copying each other’s lists, or worse, taking verbatim “toxic” lists coming out of the crusading Bush White House.

Kafka in Canada

“Kafkaesque” was used more than once to describe travesties, not of justice, but of what de Kerchove called “administrative procedure.” Those two chilling words have condemned people to much more than getting bumped from flights. In the case of Sudanese-Canadian Abousfian Adelrazik, it resulted in exile, torture, and brushes with death, before concerted legal, civil disobedience, press, and ultimately domestic political pressure shamed the Canadian government into granting a passport to one of its own citizens. “A black man, in a black site, on a black list,” is how Professor Amir Attaran of the University of Ottawa described Abdelrazik, who only escaped death because his case went beyond the courts. He had fallen into the black hole of the black list: “too innocent to charge, too guilty to fly.”

Such a gathering of legal brainpower would not be so rash as to condone terrorism, indeed one speaker denounced terrorism as one of the worst crimes against human rights. But the “craven arbitrariness,” as Attaran called blacklisting, risks subverting separation of powers and the rule of law, through extending and generalizing states of emergency.

“Proscription regimes,” as they are referred to in legal circles - black lists or no-fly lists if you will - give inordinate power to intelligence agencies, and have led to mistakes, misinformation, and deliberate disinformation changing (and ending) lives of sometimes innocent people. Blacklisted people wind up living a sort of non-life, deprived of means of earning a living, or even conducting basic economic activities (ever try to live without money?). Remember, we are sometimes talking about people whose only crime was to oppose dictators in their home countries, often quite peacefully. And once on Country A’s blacklist, it is extremely difficult - even when “cleared” - to be removed from those of Countries B through Z.

How Terrorism Ends (hint: not through war)

One of the most potent arguments opposing the wholesale, and sometimes unquestioning, inclusion of individuals and movements on blacklists came from Oliver Wils, the Director of Berlin-based NGO Berghof Peace Support, active in conflict resolution. Wils cited (as did the US Congress) a 2008 RAND Corporation study How Terrorist Groups End:

The evidence since 1968 indicates that most groups have not ended due to military pressure but because (1) they joined the political process or (2) local police and intelligence agencies arrested or killed key members and that few groups achieved victory within this timeframe.

The ending of most terrorist groups requires a range of policy instruments, such as careful police and intelligence work, military force, political negotiations, and economic sanctions. Yet policymakers need to understand where to prioritize their efforts with limited resources and attention.

The RAND study, noted Wils, shows that only 7% of terrorist groups that operated in the last four decades were put out of action by military force.

The Obama Administration wants to apply “smart power” solutions to problems exacerbated by the Bush Administration’s kinetic “War on Terror.” This week’s conference on the dangers of blacklists highlighted a number of key issues which should be of interest to smart American negotiators, and to European policy makers. With increasing focus on diplomatic solutions, will the Obama Administration pause before acceding to some dictator’s demand to put a legitimate opposition movement - even a liberation movement - on a black list? How many “peace processes” have come to a screeching halt, because one of the parties - The Outs - are declared “terrorists” by The Ins?

This post first appeared in Blogactiv.eu.

AF-PAK-IRAN - Eddies of Instability, or Negotiation Opportunity?

Whatever happened to strategic options?

Discussions of Western policy towards Iran have a numbing inevitability to them.  You're going to hear about the sanctions option, which is always there as a way of warding off the Israeli bombing option.  Two flavors - is that all we have to choose from?

The weekend's deadly attack in Iran's Sistan-Baluchistan region should be of concern in capitals other than just Tehran.  And not only because of intemperate Iranian accusations of US or British involvement, which are probably ludicrous.  [UPDATE: Or perhaps not so ludicrous: see Washington Note post by Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett].  It would appear that the Anglo-Americans have quite enough on their hands without poking the eyes of the Iranians, especially in an area where they have little or no leverage.  After all, it was only last week that Baluchis on the Pakistani side expressed fears of US drone strikes in their region, which were apparently nixed by Islamabad.

Thankfully we are no longer in the era of George W. "Axis of Evil" Bush, whose neat phrase lumped together two deadly enemies - Iraq and Iran - by simple conflation.  They were both Muslim-majority countries opposed to the United States - what more do you need?  Bush's crusade against Saddam eliminated the one enemy who had bloodied Iran, and so delivered Iraq into the Shia camp.  Blowback of which I am sure we will hear more as the US wearies of the occupation.

So why, when contemplating Iran policy, are we limited to options that are more worthy of Bush than Obama?

President Obama, after all, is He of the open hand reaching out to the clenched fist.  It's depressing that we are still arguing about Bomb Iran versus Sanction Iran, without considering Co-opt Iran.  Yes, use shared concern over ever-widening arcs of instability, eddying out from their epicenter in Afghanistan.  Pakistan is belatedly trying to deal with multiple insurgencies on its periphery, which, according to Mark Sappenfield of the Christian Science Monitor, won't necessarily help across the border: "All the major terrorist networks attacking US forces in Afghanistan operate from other areas of Pakistan."

Let's use some of the momentum from today's Vienna 4-way nuclear talks to encourage Tehran to expand the diplomatic option.  How about it, Iran: tired of importing natural gas when you're sitting on some of the world's largest reserves?  Find importing gasoline a tad expensive when you actually export the raw material?

In a neighborhood like Af/Pak, wouldn't you want to ensure a bit of stability in the surrounding countries?  India, large, dynamic, democratic to the east.  Central Asia to the north, with its economies trying to transition from Soviet command to capitalism.  And Iran to the west, looking to the west and its markets rather than obsessing about the Great Satan.

Alistair Crooke, writing in Conflicts Forum, questions whether the West (and the Arab Middle East) is again ready to consider Iran as a regional power, as it was under different management.  Whatever the answer, the recent trouble on Iran's Pakistan border may cause some policy makers - Iranian, American, and others - to consider shared interest in stability, in a region where that is in very short supply.

Image: Af/Pak coffee mug, available through Diplopundit.

Treading Water, Under the Radar: Maldives & Diego Garcia

Dots in the Indian Ocean (image: DuniyaLive.com)

The Maldives stand an average of 7ft above sea level, and the government says they face being wiped out if oceans rise.  The government of the Maldives has held a cabinet meeting about 16ft underwater to highlight the threat of global warming.

BBC, 17 October 2009

The island has an area of approximately 10.5 square miles with an average natural elevation of four feet above sea level.  The British wish you an enjoyable stay on Diego Garcia. Upon your arrival, please familiarize yourself with BIOT [British Indian Ocean Territory] regulations and try to preserve the island's ecology.

US Military Sealift Command (MSC) website briefing for US personnel

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How nice that the US Navy is concerned about the "island's ecology."  No such care was extended to the Island's human inhabitants, who were summarily exiled by an Anglo-American pact that denied their very existence (see my post about the long-suffering Chagos Islanders).

But the Maldives President's worries about being swamped under the rising tides of climate change are starting to have their impact in strategic circles.  Here's Senator John Kerry in September:

Diego Garcia Island in the Indian Ocean, a vital hub for our military operations across the Middle East, sits on an atoll just a few feet above sea level.

Kerry's concerns about the security impact of global warning (from the Boston Globe) were echoed weeks later by NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, speaking to an audience that probably cares more than most about catastrophic effects of global warming - Lloyd's of London:

Rising sea levels will have a clear effect on the ability of our armed forces to do their jobs.  Look at Diego Garcia.  It is an important logistical hub, including for this country; it is also only a few feet above sea level at its highest point.  A one metre rise in sea levels and most of it would be flooded.   We need to assess the impacts that these kinds of events would have.

Now, though it's gratifying that these two gentlemen are concerned about the planet's health and its defense, I wish that something other than the prospect of a B-52 runway getting flooded would galvanize them into action.

The upside for the Chagos Islanders, who have been quietly rotting away in distant Mauritius for upwards of forty years, is that their native Diego Garcia and other Chagos Archipelago islands might start taking water, and therefore send the US and UK scurrying for other lily pads (how about those in Central Asia?).

Maybe the Chagossians should team up with the Maldivians to drum up support for their respective causes.  With his underwater cabinet meeting stunt - "What else could I do to attract attention?" - the Maldives President appears to be on an effective public diplomacy strategy.

The Marine Corps School of Body Language

Stop!; Hands up!; Drop your weapons!; Stop your vehicle; Show me your identification card...

Selected phrases to be taught US military personnel prior to deployment to Afghanistan, from "In The Loop," Al Kamen, in today's Washington Post

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That last one - "Show me your I.D. card" - brings back memories of our Marine Security Guards at the American Consulate in Alexandria, Egypt.  The MSGs, our third line of defense after the Egyptian paramilitary guys with the Kalashnikovs and the local contract guards at the gate, manned the bulletproof glass-enclosed booth at the entrance to the Consulate proper.

Dressed in their white-hatted Marine best, they probably intimidated any poor Egyptian visa applicant who managed to get that far, if only because of their "Leatherneck" reputation.  But they were a very professional bunch of guys (this was before women MSGs appeared on the scene in the late 80s), and they did their best to learn some Arabic.  Including "Show me your I.D. card."  Result: blank stares.

Try as they might, the combination of American accent, inch-thick ballistic glass, and miles of cultural separation defeated their efforts at communication in the local vernacular.  Until they hit upon the hand over hand gesture, shown here.  Voilà!  Instant comprehension.  Oh, that I.D. card!

But here is the extra bit that the Marines learned, and taught me, who had pretty decent Arabic language skills back then: the hand over hand thing meant everything tangible, measurable.  Whatever you wanted it to mean, in context.  Want a French-style baguette loaf, and not the little round pita bread?  Right hand superimposed over left arm, up below the elbow - long.  Trying to describe a thimble-sized auto part to a mechanic?  Hand over opposite fingers - small.  And so on.  The ultimate universal gesticular mnemonic device - your hands.

General McChrystal's idea of hands-on language training before heading for Helmand makes sense, and I'd say that there are already lots of Marines and soldiers who have figured out that communication sometimes requires more than a few foreign words strung together.  Just be sure that what passes for a gesture of clarification in Egypt doesn't mean anything rude or hostile in Dari!

Eastern Exposure for New European Parliament

Europe is in Eurasia.

It wouldn’t be autumn in Brussels without its slew of conferences to welcome the city’s policy wonks back from a long European summer vacation. This week’s all-day conclave devoted to “The New European Parliament: What Priorities for Foreign Affairs, Security, and Defence?” covered a lot of ground, especially when the subtitle indicated that it would include Transatlantic relations, Russia, Iran, and Central Asia. Despite the perhaps over-ambitious agenda, a number of impressive speakers were packed into the schedule. Full disclosure: I chaired the workshop on “Iran and Central Asia,” obviously an expert now that I've been twice to Uzbekistan.

Chatham House rules prevent me from citing individual speakers, but suffice it to say that there were MEPs, EU Commission and Council representatives, as well as distinguished diplomats and academic experts. The only sparks that flew were intellectual, as the very florid Italian Professore Irnerio Seminatore, director of conference organizer IERI, shared his trademark passion for realpolitik, which he sees as an endangered species in need of protection in this city dedicated to multilateral and intergovernmental organizations. The event was co-sponsored by ISIS-Europe (organizer of this year’s excellent “NATO Shadow Summit“), and the Euro-Atlantic Association of Belgium (AEAB).

If I give short shrift to the workshop on Russia and the EU’s Eastern Partnership, it’s because I couldn’t be in two places at once. Read about the Eastern Partnership on the EU's official DG Relex page. It was also impossible to take advantage of Ambassador Pierre Morel’s dual-hatted expertise as EU Special Representative for Georgia (part of the Eastern Partnership) and EU Special Representative for Central Asia. Luckily for my panel, he put on his Central Asia hat.

Garnering as much knowledge as possible about sometimes-troubled lands to the East is in the interests of Europe and its Parliament. The audience was reminded of Europe’s energy dependence on Russia, but also its deep commercial ties that go beyond gas. The US-Russian talks on Iran, which were barely over when our conference started, were a reminder that Europe’s geo-strategic concerns are shared by the two nuclear giants.

We were reminded of Iran’s once central position in Western assumptions (mostly those of American Presidents) as “an island of stability” in the Middle East.  That same heyday of the Shah saw the birth of Iran’s nuclear program, which is so troubling to its neighbors and to the West.  But given Iran’s long history - Persia was a “world power” for centuries when “the world” was more strictly defined - and its strains of national pride and/or national victim hood, it won’t be easy to woo Tehran from what it considers its right to develop nuclear power (homework assignment: define "Power").

Central Asia’s inclusion in the debate illustrates what one expert called “the discovery of Central Asia” by Western policy makers. As Afghanistan’s and Iran’s immediate northern neighbors, they are affected by dangers of fundamentalism, of instability, and of war, and their voices need to be heard as we look at the wider region.

In all, not a bad way to kick off the conference season, and a reminder that things start in the East (image: sunrise over Eurasia by the talented Tibor Tóth).

This post first appeared in Euractiv's "Blogactiv," a compendium of European opinion.

"The Army of Crime" - Criminal, Terrorist, or Patriot?

L'Armée du Crime

The lump that was in my throat during the 139 minutes of L'Armée du Crime, Robert Guédiguian's dramatization of the "Manouchian Group" story has subsided, but the emotion remains.  This is a good, old fashioned, based-on-fact war story that needed to be told, and in the veteran French-Armenian director's hands, it has been done justice.

"Justice," such as it was during the dark years of the Nazi Occupation of France and the active collaboration of the Vichy government of Maréchal Pétain, was of course in the hands of the victors.  The Manouchian Group - we know their fate in the film's first moments - is given a show trial and accused of carrying out "terrorist acts" against the occupier.

The film does not actually glorify terrorism - few of the group are natural killers, least of all poet Missak Manouchian, who becomes its leader - but its portrayal of the various assassinations, ambushes, and bombings carried out in Paris is factual.  The Musée de la Résistance Nationale has lent its stamp of approval, even providing an excellent "teachers' guide" available on the film's official site.

The film's poster tells you the essentials: Manouchian's collection of resistance fighters - "Jews, Poles, Hungarians, Italians, Spanish, and Armenians" - came from the ranks of the MOI, la Main-d'oeuvre immigrée, foreign communists who had found refuge in France, and many of whom were veteran anti-fascists from the Spanish Civil War.  The film deftly shows their trajectory from simple immigrant workers lying low during the early days of the Occupation, through uncoordinated individual acts against the Germans, to full-blown integration into what became the Resistance.

Guédiguian has a stable of actors who regularly surface in his films, and one of his regulars, Jean-Pierre Darroussin, playing the composite character of "Commissaire David," manages to incarnate the contradictions and betrayals that were the hallmark of French officialdom's reaction to defeat at the hands of the Germans.  While Darroussin's understated performance captures all the ambiguity, the script sometimes hammers French culpability down our throats, especially when depicting torture by French police - not Nazis.

All of which, Guédiguian tells us, is based on historic documentation.  Even the soundtrack is historically significant: listen to Maurice Chevalier's "Ça sent si bon la France" and savor not only the irony in the 1941 song's selection for the soundtrack, but reflect that the crooner was long shunned after the war for his dalliance with collaboration.

Terrorism, torture... you might get the impression that the director is trying to send a contemporary message while educating his audience on a part of French history often overlooked.  That would be correct: Guédiguian is a committed leftist, who mourns the passing of the kind of militant trade unionism that was the petri dish for the Manouchian Group.

French men and women who remember that their soldiers tortured Algerians in their war of independence but forget that Frenchmen tortured Frenchmen in the Nazi cause will find L'Armée du Crime unnerving.  Americans who acknowledge that "enhanced interrogation" has been carried out in their name will be reminded that water torture is not always as clean and clinical as shown in stock Pentagon or CIA footage.  And we used to think it was only the Gestapo that did such despicable things.

At least the 23 members of the Manouchian Group, tortured and executed in the dank dungeons along the Seine for their adopted country, now have a fitting cinematic tribute to their bravery.

Obama's Nobel Preventive Peace Prize

24 hours after Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said that Middle East peace is "impossible" and, especially helpfully in case that message appeared overly pessimistic, that many countries "have learned to live with" a permanent state of war, the Nobel Committee has awarded the 2009 Peace Prize to US President Barack Obama.

The President's personal honor can be shared with all those Americans who voted for him almost one year ago - they made the election of a potential peace maker possible.  I stress potential, for that is obviously what the Nobel Committee has in mind in designating a President who currently has not one but two wars on his hands:

For 108 years, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has sought to stimulate precisely that international policy and those attitudes for which Obama is now the world's leading spokesman.

As a former diplomat who joined hundreds of my colleagues in campaigning for Obama last year, it is gratifying that the Nobel Committee cited him for "his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and co-operation between peoples."

The award can't have come at a more important juncture.  Not only must the US deal with a belligerent Israeli government personified by Avigdor Lieberman, but Obama must craft an Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran policy that may contain as many military "elements of national power" as diplomatic.  The Nobel people are aware of this more than most, and want to put their weight preemptively on the side of diplomatic solutions.

At the same time, since the President will probably have to give the 10 million Swedish kronor (about $1.4 million) to the US Treasury, the Nobel Foundation is doing its bit to help the parlous state of the deficit.  With the dollar falling by the day, those kronor might be even more valuable next week.

Seriously, the President brings great credit to an office that was seriously discredited by his predecessor, who practiced preventive war instead of waging peace.  My humble congratulations.

Now, to the job at hand.  Please, Mr. President, have a heart-to-heart talk with Mr. Lieberman and his boss Bibi, who once said that the 9/11 attack on the US was good for Israel.  Talk about giving fodder to the conspiracy theorists...