The staff of Tan Nguyen, a Republican running for the Congressional seat in California currently held by Rep. Loretta Sanchez, mailed thousands of letters written in Spanish aimed at intimidating Latino voters from staying home on election day. But Tan seems rather confused as to who has done wrong. The Washington Post reports:

“Nguyen, a Vietnamese immigrant trying to unseat popular Democratic Rep. Loretta Sanchez, last week blamed an unidentified staffer for sending out 14,000 letters warning immigrants they could be deported or jailed for voting in next month’s election. The mailings sparked state and federal probes.

[…]

“There has been no crime committed so why is there a criminal investigation three weeks prior to a very important election? What is going on? Who is fueling this investigation?” he asked.”

Tan has no chance of winning in November, but he is certainly illustrating the kind of choice people across the country have to make–do they want more Republican candidates offering racist immigration policies alongside assurances that there has been “no crime committed” over their disreputable political tactics?

[photo: AP]

Writer Spencer Ackerman had his “Iraq’d” blog shut down some time ago, but now he’s gotten the full dismissal. He has announced on his blog that he no longer works at the New Republic:

“On Wednesday, The New Republic and I parted ways, ending my four-year association with the magazine. The ostensible reason for my release concerns my relationship with Franklin Foer and the magazine’s other editors. However, the irreconcilable ideological differences between myself and the top editors at the magazine have been clear to me for months now, and clear to them as well.”

Months is the key word. A few years ago in 2003, he seemed to be more in step, writing this:

“It had the feel of a victory lap. After delivering his devastating Iraq presentation to the U.N. Security Council this week, Secretary of State Colin Powell basked in the adulatory glow of the Sunday morning talk shows. Tim Russert brought the trophy, a Gallup poll showing public trust in Powell eclipsing trust in his boss on the Iraq issue by more than two to one(Powell 63 percent, Bush 24 percent). Powell, with military discipline, waved it off. “I just go about my business and don’t worry about polls,” he said, with every muscle in his face struggling valiantly to suppress a pie-eating grin.

But any celebration would be premature. Powell may have been lionized in the press last week for his deft U.N. performance, but his diplomatic skills will face a far greater challenge this week, when his task will be considerably harder than keeping Security Council foreign ministers awake through over 90 minutes of communications intercepts and satellite photos. It is this Friday, after all, that chief weapons inspectors Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei will update the Council on the state of Iraqi compliance. At that point, Powell told Russert, the United States will ask the Council to “immediately determine” the fate of Saddam Hussein.

The hitch is that over the weekend the press reported that France and Germany would try to preempt any U.S. action at the Security Council by presenting an alternative proposal to send hundreds more inspectors to Iraq backed with U.N. peacekeepers as a way to enforce the “serious consequences” clause of Resolution 1441. The eleventh-hour proposal–which the Bush administration had to read about in Der Spiegel–could place serious pressure on Britain, where public support for war is rapidly deteriorating, and perhaps on the Bush administration as well.

In the meantime, Powell proved no exception to reports that administration officials were privately fuming that they had to learn about the proposal from reporters. “It’s the wrong issue,” Powell told Russert, demonstrating the approach he may have to pursue in New York this week. “The issue is not more inspectors. The issue is compliance on the part of Saddam Hussein. … If he is not complying, then what is more time for? For what purpose?” While he diplomatically allowed that he had not seen what the French and Germans were proposing, Powell basically nixed the idea, calling it a “diversion, not a solution.” To George Stephanopoulos, who began his Powell interview with questions about the French and German proposal, the secretary was even more dismissive. “What are these blue-helmeted U.N. forces going to do?” Powell sneered, sounding for a moment like Donald Rumsfeld. “Shoot their way into Iraqi compounds?” The proposal, Powell implied, would continue to allow Saddam to force “inspectors to play detectives or Inspector Clouseau, running all over Iraq to look for this material.””

In 2002, Ackerman authored a piece outlining the mechanics of stoking a war with Iraq, seeing widespread international opposition as something to be circumvented rather than taken seriously, writing a piece called “Storm Window: How to Time War in Iraq”:

“For all of their differences over U.S. policy toward Iraq, Brent Scowcroft and Donald Rumsfeld agree on one essential point: Our allies have no appetite for preemptive strikes to destroy Saddam Hussein’s regime. “There is a virtual consensus in the world against an attack on Iraq at this time,” Scowcroft wrote in his now-famous Wall Street Journal op-ed opposing a first-strike against Iraq. During a visit to California‘s Camp Pendleton last Tuesday–a visit designed to bolster support for the strikes–Rumsfeld essentially conceded the point. “It’s less important to have unanimity than it is making the right decision and doing the right thing, even though at the outset it may seem lonesome,” the defense secretary asserted.

But international opposition to a preemptive war on Iraq might not be as steadfast as these two men–and their many supporters on either side of the Iraq debate–seem to think. Writing in The Washington Post last week, Richard Holbrooke, the American ambassador to the United Nations at the end of the Clinton administration, sketched out how it could be done. Basically, the United States would have to go through the U.N. Security Council and obtain a resolution authorizing a new inspections regime–a resolution demanding unfettered access, no timetable for completion, and unconditional acceptance, and authorizing the use of force to punish noncompliance. Although Iraq‘s history completely justifies this sort of treatment, the Iraqis will never accept such stringent international demands. Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz yesterday admitted that Iraq will not acknowledge the legitimacy of such a inspections team, stating in Johannesburg that “if [the United Nations] send[s] people who will drag their feet for years without reaching a conclusion as they did for seven and a half years, that’s not going to work.” Assuming Iraq indeed rejects such an inspections regime–and there’s every reason to believe it would, given the history–the resolution would justify waging war. “[F]ew Americans today understand the enormous force, both moral and political, that a Security Council resolution carries in the rest of the world,” Holbrooke wrote. “It mobilizes international opinion, forces concerted action and can mute much criticism.”

Of course, the trick here is getting the Security Council to go along with such a strongly worded resolution in the first place. Of the council’s four other permanent members–Britain, China, France, Russia–each has veto power over resolutions. And each has misgivings, in some cases profound, over war with Iraq.

But that doesn’t mean these misgivings can’t be overcome. It’s at least conceivable–and some would say likely–that even the most steadfast U.S. critics on the council could be won over with the right diplomatic maneuvering. In some cases, it would just be a matter of making visible multilateral gestures to quell mounting international criticism of U.S. policy. In other cases, the United States might have to give other nations certain economic incentives for cooperation.”

“It’s fair to wonder,” indeed, why Ackerman didn’t look in a more substantive way at the doubts about the Iraq war rather than simply looking at the political mechanics of getting there. Here he questions “how successful” Joe Biden would be, in 2003, in raising some questions about the upcoming attack:

“By staging his hearings before the recess, Biden gives Congress a chance to raise questions and establish appropriate criteria for going to war, as he had begun to do during the week. But it’s fair to wonder just how successful this effort can be. No matter how cogent Biden sounds, the administration always has a rhetorical weapon against him. All they have to do is change the subject to the 1991 Gulf War–a subject as likely to leave Biden stammering as it did on Sunday.”

So it’s good that Ackerman now finds himself at odds with the neocons at the New Republic, but it it’s hard to understand where all this (thinly veiled with praise and pleasantries) righteousness (or those “irreconcilable differences”) comes from. Of course, I may not be fully briefed on the latest, the New Republic is a magazine in marked decline and I have glanced at it less over time like many readers, as this page at stateofthenewsmedia.org discusses the circulation problems the magazine has been having:

“According to its own estimates the New Republic has taken a large hit in circulation, dropping by almost 25,000 from 85,904 in 2002 to 61,124 in 2003 (the latest numbers available). That would be a drop of 29% in one year.”

Iceland went back to the reprehensible practice of whaling this week, cutting up a large, intelligent mammal for no good reason and in violation of international norms against commercial hunting of whales and the concerns for survival of some whale species. The Guardian reports:

“Iceland broke the global moratorium on whaling yesterday when it killed an endangered fin whale for the first time since the 1980s. It attracted international condemnation for the resumption of its commercial whaling operations.

Icelandic television footage showed the whale being towed into harbour. The 20-metre (65ft) long mammal was harpooned in the north Atlantic, about 200 miles west of the country.

The government announced it plans to issue licences to kill nine fin whales and 30 minke whales by next August. Conservation groups denounced the move. Joth Singh of the International Fund for Animal Welfare said the hunt was “cruel and unnecessary”, while the European commission urged the country to reconsider its decision.”

[photo–Iceland —Oct. 22, 2006: AP via Yahoo]

Russia’s Putin continues to intimidate and threaten out of business some of the last vestiges of democracy. From the Washington Post:

“Russia on Thursday suspended the activities of Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the International Republican Institute and more than 90 other foreign nongovernmental organizations, saying they failed to meet the registration requirements of a controversial new law designed to bring activists here under much closer government scrutiny.
Across the country, foreign grass-roots organizations that investigate human rights abuses, promote democracy and work with refugees folded their tents until further notice, informing staff that all operations must cease immediately. The only work officially authorized was the paying of staff and bills.
The law, signed by President Vladimir Putin at the start of the year, drew broad criticism as part of a general rollback of democratic freedoms in Russia. Activists said it was intended to rein in one of the last areas of independent civic life here; Putin called it necessary to prevent foreigners from interfering in the country’s political process.”

This CNN report from 2001 shows George W. Bush’s opinion, at least initially, about Putin:

“After nearly two hours of face-to-face talks on Saturday, Bush said he felt he could “trust” Putin.

The leaders agreed to meet for summits in each country. Bush invited Putin to his ranch in Crawford, Texas, in the autumn. Putin returned the courtesy with an invitation to his home in Moscow.

They will also meet at the Group of Eight meeting in Genoa, Italy, next month and in Shanghai at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting in October.

“I wouldn’t have invited him to my ranch if I didn’t trust him,” Bush said at a joint news conference after the two spent 1 hour and 40 minutes in one-on-one talks — more than twice the time originally scheduled. “We can make the world safer, more prosperous.”

[…]

The body language between the two appeared genuinely comfortable. Bush said the talks never digressed into “diplomatic chit chat” and that during the talks he took a measure of Putin’s soul, finding the Russian leaders “straight-forward and trustworthy.”

“Mark me down as very pleased,” Bush said at one point.

Putin said the new U.S. president understood Russia‘s history and found himself impressed with his global perspective on a number of issues. Significantly, Putin said it was “very important” for him to hear Bush say Russia was no longer an enemy.”

Many people in America don’t like those human rights organizations much either, by the way. Are their reasons entirely different than Putin’s? As Aryeh Neier writes in the New York Review of Books:

“One of those who responded angrily to the Human Rights Watch report was Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League. He said, “Human Rights Watch’s approach to these problems is immorality at the highest level,” and he accused Kenneth Roth of engaging in “a classic anti-Semitic stereotype about Jews” for using the term an “eye for an eye” when referring to Israel’s policies.[2] Rabbi Avi Shafran, a spokesman for Agudath Israel of America, a leading Orthodox group, compared Roth to Mel Gibson.[3] Martin Peretz of The New Republic said that “this Human Rights Watch libel has utterly destroyed its credibility, at least for me.”[4] And Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, never to be outdone, wrote in The Jerusalem Post, “When it comes to Israel and its enemies, Human Rights Watch cooks the books about facts, cheats on interviews, and puts out predetermined conclusions that are driven more by their ideology than by evidence.”[5]”

[photo of Putin: flickr.com]

“Union Square, San-Francisco” 10/14/2006
“Dinosaur Pictures presents 48 wild seconds at the southeast corner of Union Square, San Francisco, California, on Oct. 14, 2006. Producer: Jessica Dryden-Cook; Exec. Producer: Daniel J. McKeown.”

After losing a war to a mere proxy of Iran in this summer’s defeat to Hizbullah, Israel‘s prime minister is making a laughable attempt to intimidate the country with the world’s largest natural gas reserves and whose allies run Iraq. More surprising than the brutish rhetoric is the fact that he’s still in the job. Can Israel find no one better?
From AFP:

“Visiting Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert stepped up rhetoric against Iran, saying the its controversial nuclear program could be prevented through intimidation.

Speaking to reporters following meetings with President Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin, Olmert said he had told Putin that “there was no chance of preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear arms if Iran is not afraid.“

“The Iranians should be afraid that something they don’t want to happen will occur,” he said.

Olmert went on to say that “I made it clear why in my opinion it is important that the Iranians are afraid,” but he fell short of mentioning what measures that be taken against the Islamic state.

He nevertheless sought a tougher Russian stance against Iran, where Russian engineers are building the country’s first reactor.”

The Weekly Standard had this to say about this summer’s war between Israel and Lebanon:

“The right response is renewed strength–in supporting the governments of Iraq and Afghanistan, in standing with Israel, and in pursuing regime change in Syria and Iran. For that matter, we might consider countering this act of Iranian aggression with a military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities. Why wait? Does anyone think a nuclear Iran can be contained? That the current regime will negotiate in good faith? It would be easier to act sooner rather than later. Yes, there would be repercussions–and they would be healthy ones, showing a strong America that has rejected further appeasement.

But such a military strike would take a while to organize. In the meantime, perhaps President Bush can fly from the silly G8 summit in St. Petersburg–a summit that will most likely convey a message of moral confusion and political indecision–to Jerusalem, the capital of a nation that stands with us, and is willing to fight with us, against our common enemies. This is our war, too.”

If this war was really “our war, too,” then we had a part in committing numerous war crimes. Human Rights Watch reported, among other things, that both Israel and Hizbullah used cluster bombs in the 2006 war:

“Hezbollah fired cluster munitions into civilian areas in northern Israel during the recent conflict, Human Rights Watch reported today. This is the first time that Hezbollah’s use of these controversial weapons has been confirmed.

Hezbollah’s deployment of the Chinese-made Type-81 122mm rocket is also the first confirmed use of this particular model of cluster munition anywhere in the world. Human Rights Watch documented two Type-81 cluster strikes that took place on July 25 in the Galilee village of Mghar.”

“On July 24, 2006, Human Rights Watch was the first to confirm Israel’s use of cluster munitions in Lebanon, when it broke the news that a July 19 attack on the village of Blida left one civilian dead and 12 wounded. Human Rights Watch tracked the use of cluster munitions throughout the conflict, and successfully urged the United States not to ship new cluster munitions to Israel. Since the end of the fighting, Human Rights Watch has investigated the humanitarian impact of dangerous unexploded submunitions on civilians in southern Lebanon.”

An attack on Iran by America would be a terrifying, utterly contemptible aggression and attempts to recast violations of the UN Charter or the Geneva Conventions as a wise policy of “pre-emption” or “unilateralism” should be brushed aside this time as old authoritarian apologia—well, as George W. Bush’s speech of 9/20/2001 said (perhaps about his own administration):

“And they will follow that path all the way, to where it ends: in history’s unmarked grave of discarded lies.”

Is an attack on Iran some sort of neocon fantasy? Perhaps it is actually quite a real danger, something that could happen if Bush and Cheney are not stopped. Former weapons inspector Scott Ritter, who correctly claimed before the 2003 Iraq invasion that the country had no WMDs, is now sounding the warning that confrontation is at hand, as he says on Democracy Now:

“Well, the most important thing is to understand the reality that Iran is squarely in the crosshairs as a target of the Bush administration, in particular, as a target of the Bush administration as it deals — as it relates to the National Security Strategy of the United States. You see, this isn’t a hypothetical debate among political analysts, foreign policy specialists. Read the 2006 version of the National Security Strategy, where Iran is named sixteen times as the number one threat to the national security of the United States of America, because in the same document, it embraces the notion of pre-emptive wars of aggression as a legitimate means of dealing with such threats. It also recertifies the Bush administration doctrine of regional transformation globally, but in this case particularly in the Middle East. So, we’re not talking about hypotheticals here, regardless of all the discussion the Bush administration would like you to believe there is about diplomacy. There is no diplomacy, as was the case with Iraq. Diplom
acy is but a smokescreen to disguise the ultimate objective of regime change.”

Anyone who is making the case that Iran has a reasonable regime that just wants some respect is probably quite blind to the faults of that tyrannical and medieval government in Tehran. They are limiting Internet access, for one thing (from the LA Times):

“Iran‘s Internet service providers have started reducing the speed of access for computers in homes and cafes based on new government-imposed limits.

An official said last week that service providers were forbidden by the Telecommunications Ministry from providing Internet connections faster than 128 kilobytes per second, the official IRNA news agency reported. He did not give a reason.”

They don’t need a reason—it’s an arbitrary government by ayatollahs that oppresses its own people and fails to deliver broad economic opportunity. But every country has its problems, and in Iran’s case they are somewhat ameliorated by high oil and gas prices. America cannot handle another war, currently bogged down as it is in the countries east and west of Iran (Iraq and Afghanistan), so America should stop trying to intimidate and demonize Iran, and stop the Israelis from doing that too, and just wait until Iran actually attacks a country or something before threatening them. Deterrence has worked on Pakistan, they haven’t used nuclear weapons, and even North Korea faces an American arsenal of nuclear arms in Japan and South Korea that would intimidate anyone.

If the Israelis want to lose another war, that’s their problem. It’s time for America to pack up and go home. Yet a lot of speculation is swirling around aircraft carrier movements by the Navy. People should probably do something to stop a war with Iran, but as Arthur Silber wrote in his blog, the Democratic party probably can’t be counted to do it:

“As I discussed in detail the other day, just as in the case of the long leadup to passage of the Military Commissions Act, the Democrats have nothing to say about Iran except to echo the administration line that a potentially nuclear Iran — lying four to five years in the future, or even further — is “unacceptable” and “intolerable.””

The people setting the debate about Iran seem to include some of the same zealots and fabricators that encouraged the war in Iaq. In a letter to a Rolling Stone writer, Michael Ledeen provides this argument:

“Somehow imagining that I want to invade Iran, he quotes an article of mine in National Review Online in which I call for the United States to support regime change in Syria and Iran, as if that meant a military campaign.”

Well, no, maybe not (certainly not you personally), but it does sound like you think you know how to run that place (have you ever even been there?) better than the nuts running it now. “Regime change,” that’s still in the lexicon? Shut up.

[photo of Ehud Olmert: AFP via Yahoo]