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David Sanger has been writing the conventional wisdom for as long as I can remember, but this morning he has really become John McCain’s talking puppet. In trying to justify why we should be sending troops to Syria and Libya, he quotes Romney Neo Con Eliot Cohen.

To Mr. Obama’s critics, the root of the seeming absence of American leverage in the Middle East today is a light footprint that was simply too light.

“I think the way to understand Obama’s approach — I wouldn’t call it a strategy — is that he has a uniform preference to keep most problems at a distance,” said Eliot A. Cohen, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies who worked for Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign and helped develop Mr. Romney’s critique of Mr. Obama’s approach. “That is what the light footprint has been all about. And it’s run out of gas.”

I have no patience for Sanger or any of the Beltway buffoons who managed to convince us for 60 years that the United States needs to be the unpaid policeman of the world. How much blood and treasure in useless wars that will never solve Sunni-Shia conflict, is enough for these chicken hawks? Obama’s did exactly the right thing in Libya,and he is right to stay out of the Syrian Civil War. I will say what no one seems to acknowledge. Ambassador Chris Stevens had no business being in Benghazi with a two person security detail. It was only his own self inflated sense of invulnerability that brought him there and there is no reason to change Obama’s new “light touch” foreign policy, just because Stevens made a mistake.

I know I’m going to catch hell for this post because no one is allowed to criticize Israel, but I’m really tired of our foreign policy being driven by Right Wing Israeli politics. Two cases in point this morning. First is Netanyahu lecturing President Obama on how we should go to war against Iran.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel inserted himself into the most contentious foreign policy issue of the American presidential campaign on Tuesday, criticizing the Obama administration for refusing to set clear “red lines” on Iran’s nuclear progress that would prompt the United States to undertake a military strike. As a result, he said, the administration has no “moral right” to restrain Israel from taking military action of its own.

I hate to clue Bibi in, but the American public is sick of fighting wars in the Mideast and we have no desire to start another one. As the Chicago Council Poll shows, two in three Americans believe the Afghanistan war was not worth fighting.

It may be that Mitt Romney is in the minority that wants more war, but as the New York Times shows, Mitt has always been a chickenhawk, way back to Vietnam. I knew people like Mitt Romney at Princeton in 1967. They were really pro war, but they wouldn’t have been caught dead in a uniform.

The second and more troubling aspect of Israeli Right Wing Politics driving events in the Mid East is the killing of the American Ambassador to Libya. As the Wall Street Journal reports this morning, the crude and vicious anti-Muslim film that has been driving Anti-American outrage in Egypt and Libya over the past 48 hours is a product of an Israeli “filmmaker” named Sam Bacile, who is living in California.

Speaking by phone Tuesday from an undisclosed location, writer and director Sam Bacile remained defiant, saying Islam is a cancer and that the 56-year-old intended his film to be a provocative political statement condemning the religion.

Protesters angered over Mr. Bacile’s film opened fire on and burned down the U.S. consulate in the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi. Libyan officials said Wednesday that Ambassador Chris Stevens was killed Tuesday night when he and a group of embassy employees went to the consulate to try to evacuate staff as the building came under attack by a mob firing machine guns and rocket propelled grenades.

In Egypt, protesters scaled the walls of the U.S. Embassy in Cairo and replaced an American flag with an Islamic banner.

“This is a political movie,” Mr. Bacile said. “The U.S. lost a lot of money and a lot of people in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but we’re fighting with ideas.”

Mr. Bacile, a California real-estate developer who identifies himself as an Israeli Jew, said he believes the movie will help his native land by exposing Islam’s flaws to the world.

The two-hour movie, “Innocence of Muslims,” cost $5 million to make and was financed with the help of more than 100 Jewish donors, said Mr. Bacile, who wrote and directed it.

The film claims Prophet Muhammad was a fraud. The 14-minute trailer of the movie that reportedly set off the protests, posted on the website YouTube in an original English version and another dubbed into Egyptian Arabic, shows an amateur cast performing a wooden dialogue of insults disguised as revelations about Prophet Muhammad, whose obedient followers are presented as a cadre of goons.

It depicts Prophet Muhammad as a feckless philanderer who approved of child sexual abuse, among other overtly insulting claims that have caused outrage

So who are the hundred donors who paid for this piece of shit, which has no other purpose than to stir up trouble for America in Arab lands? Was Sheldon Adelson one of them? Will Romney condemn this film? Will he show he is not a shill for his good friend Bibi Netanyahu?

Don’t bet on it.

The reports of the death of the Neo-Conservative Movement have been greatly exaggerated. Dick Cheney has become a cheerleader for Newt Gingrich whose sole intention seems to be to continue The Long War ad infinitum. On a day when we finally ended the most disastrous strategy of the Neo-Cons, the Iraq War, Gingrich is doubling down on the next war–In Iran.

He painted a chain of events in which an Israeli prime minister asked an American president for help with a conventional military invasion of Iran so that Israel would not have to use its nuclear arsenal to defend itself. Mr. Gingrich implied that he would go along. “What I won’t do is allow Israel to be threatened with another Holocaust,” he said. “This is a not-very-far-down-the-road decision.”

A joint US-Israeli invasion of Iran! Unfuckingbelievable. These people are counting on the collective amnesia of Americans.

The juxtaposition of the Gingrich-Cheney Plan for our future with the New York Times discovery of a cache of Top Secret documents about the Haditha Massacre in Iraq couldn’t have been more poignant .

The stress of combat left some soldiers paralyzed, the testimony shows. Troops, traumatized by the rising violence and feeling constantly under siege, grew increasingly twitchy, killing more and more civilians in accidental encounters. Others became so desensitized and inured to the killing that they fired on Iraqi civilians deliberately while their fellow soldiers snapped pictures, and were court-martialed. The bodies piled up at a time when the war had gone horribly wrong.

As I have said before, this election needs to be fought on two issues: income inequality and cutting the bloated Pentagon and our imperial overreach. Whether President Obama and the Democrats have the guts to fight on those issues will be a test, but strangely enough they might find support among the Ron Paul wing of the Republican party in that fight.

I run an Innovation Lab at USC. It is supported by some of the most innovative companies in the world. I can tell you one thing with certainty—the truly innovative companies have learned to devolve power and flatten organization structures. If the United States is to survive as the design and innovation hub of the digital world, it is going to have to have a government structure designed for a 21st Century World. And that means that power and funding is going to need to devolve from the Federal level to the State and City level. I’ve been writing about this idea for almost five years, but I’m more convinced than ever that some sort of New Federalism is the only way out of the grinding political gridlock that is destroying our country. Democrats cannot fight this notion that power that is closer “to the customer”, is more efficient power.

But the problem with giving the states more responsibility is that you need to encourage mobility in America, not discourage it. If my 2050 version of Social Security is being managed at the state level, it’s just harder to move. The beauty of a Federal social insurance system is that there is never any impediment to get up and move to where the work is. Your social security number is good anywhere.

So let me specify what I think we need a Federal Government for:Departments of Defense, State, Treasury, Veterans Affairs and Homeland Security as well as  Social Security and Medicare benefits. Everything else should be a State matter. Certainly law enforcement agencies like the FBI and SEC would operate at the Federal Level to enforce Federal statutes, but the funding and the personnel for the departments of Education, Agriculture, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Commerce, Transportation and Labor should primarily exist at the State level. Obviously both the Housing and the Agriculture departments in California and Mississippi would be concerned with very different issues. And of course as the Imperial Dreams of America come down to earth, the bloated Defense and Homeland Security budgets would shrink dramatically. Read more…

When I started promulgating this notion of The Interregnum–”The old is dying and the new cannot be born;in this interregnum morbid symptoms abound”(Gramsci)–two years ago, I had no idea how morbid the symptoms would get.

The last week has been as depressing culturally and politically as any in my recent memory. On the political front, the whole Washington edifice seems so terminally broken that I can neither summon the energy to believe that passing this health care legislation which will force every American to pay 15% of their earnings to a private health insurer  is worth the kind of energy I and my friends brought to the 2008 election campaign. Nor can I summon the vitriol to denounce the charlatans like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck–the Private Jet Populists–the new Lonesome Rhodes from A Face in the Crowd–for their cynical manipulation of the paranoid conspiracy theorists that we call Teabaggers. The whole scene seems like some ancient Roman tragedy where King Pyrrhus upon defeating the Romans at such cost to his own followers turns to his general and says, “Another such victory and I am undone.”

And then I venture out in to the culture– the Hollywood Oscar parties–the reality TV–the Facebook posts–the TMZ front page–and I think that so little of it passes the “who cares” test. I met Guy Trebay a couple of years ago when we did a conference called Ready to Share. He writes about fashion with the acid vision of a 21st Century Trollope. This rung true.

And that was when someone else mentioned that fame is so cheap these days, that paparazzi fodder is so interchangeable, that celebrities are so dime-a-dozen, that often one has no idea whom the photographers are making a fuss about.

Perhaps, this person added, someone ought to invent celebrity Shazam, a fame app based on the music identification service available on cellphones.

That way, in a landscape prophesied with cold accuracy by Andy Warhol, one could point a camera phone at a given person and immediately learn which minor Italian soccer player or which trophy wife of which French intellectual or which former actor on a Jerry Bruckheimer crime-scene juggernaut one was gawping at.

It all seems so fucking inconsequential. Here we are stuck in two wars where our boys and girls, as young as the kids I teach at USC, are dying every day and it is as if they aren’t even real. What if the 26 year old coke sniffing Wall Street trader was in danger of being drafted? Would he then pay a bit more attention? A filmmaker like Paul Greengrass in Green Zone, puts evidence of the most treacherous deceptions by your government before you in the most wonderful style and panache and you ignore him. Read more…

In 1922, the British Empire held sway over a population of about 458 million people, one-quarter of the world’s population,and covered more than 13,000,000 square miles: approximately a quarter of the Earth’s total land area. By 1956, after the disastrous attempt to hold on to the Suez Canal, the British finally abandoned the last of their imperial pretensions and settled into rebuilding their own country, culture and spirit. By 1964 the world was sharing in the joy of life after empire.

To read the analysis of David Sanger in the New York Times this morning, life in America for our children will be a pinched, pale shadow of itself.

For Mr. Obama and his successors, the effect of those projections is clear: Unless miraculous growth, or miraculous political compromises, creates some unforeseen change over the next decade, there is virtually no room for new domestic initiatives for Mr. Obama or his successors. Beyond that lies the possibility that the United States could begin to suffer the same disease that has afflicted Japan over the past decade. As debt grew more rapidly than income, that country’s influence around the world eroded. Read more…

I don’t often say this, but George Will gets it exactly right.

But before launching New Deal 2.0 in Afghanistan, the Obama administration should ask itself: If U.S. forces are there to prevent re-establishment of al-Qaeda bases — evidently there are none now — must there be nation-building invasions of Somalia, Yemen and other sovereignty vacuums? U.S. forces are being increased by 21,000 to 68,000, bringing the coalition total to 110,000. About 9,000 are from Britain, where support for the war is waning. Counterinsurgency theory concerning the time and the ratio of forces required to protect the population indicates that, nationwide, Afghanistan would need hundreds of thousands of coalition troops, perhaps for a decade or more. That is inconceivable.

So, instead, forces should be substantially reduced to serve a comprehensively revised policy: America should do only what can be done from offshore, using intelligence, drones, cruise missiles, airstrikes and small, potent special forces units, concentrating on the porous 1,500-mile border with Pakistan, a nation that actually matters. Genius, said de Gaulle, recalling Bismarck’s decision to halt German forces short of Paris in 1870, sometimes consists of knowing when to stop. Genius is not required to recognize that in Afghanistan, when means now, before more American valor, such as Allen’s, is squandered.

This column is causing great controversy on the Right, but almost no comment from Progressives. Have we forgotten how Lyndon Johnson’s obsession with Vietnam poisoned the legacy of his domestic accomplishments?
This is where Obama has to make his bones. Get out of Afghanistan.

“The old is dying and the new cannot be born.  In this interregnum there arises a great diversity of morbid symptoms.”-Gramsci

“What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them.”-Obama

It is all well and good for our new President to acknowledge our interregnum moment, but I worry that his advisers think it’s rhetoric and not reality. Take the banking crisis for example.

If policy makers were even remotely honest, analysts said, they would force banks to take huge write-downs and insist on a high price in return for taking bailout money. For practical purposes, that could mean nationalization or partial nationalization for many banks.

So here are the choices for the economic team. Either you force the banks to acknowledge that many of the CDO’s on their balance sheet are worthless and nationalize the ones worth saving, thereby wiping out the equity holders. Or you persist in the fantasy (like Japan did for ten years in the 90′s) that these assets will “come back to par” in the distant future, because you refuse to cross the theoretical rubicon of Nationalization.

And here are the choices for the national security team. Either you acknowledge that our military was built to fight a war with another superpower that disappeared in 1989 and that radical transformation of the force structure is needed to defend against small, networked non state actors. Or you persist in the fantasy that one day in the future we will have to fight a nuclear and conventional war with a new superpower like China, because you refuse to accept that the world has fundamentally changed. 

Obama realizes the world has changed. Throughout the speech there were acknowledgements of this. But unless he is willing to allow radical new thinking “to be born”, we will be stuck in the Interregnum.

USC/Annenberg School has put a new version of my America 3.0:Rebooting After the Crash up on their You Tube Site. Watch it in the High Quality Setting. It will be up on I Tunes U next week as a free download.

The three cabinet positions that will define the Obama administration are Treasury, State and Defense. The first name floated for Treasury is Larry Summers. This would be a disaster. If one thing Obama promised to end was Clintonomics, as represented by Bob Rubin and Larry Summers. The notion of a “Restoration” was soundly rejected in the Democratic Primaries. Summers would be the same old crowd with the same old coddling of Wall Street. These guys presided over the beginnings of financial deregulation and they should have nothing to do with the new Treasury Department. A far better choice would be Tim Geithner, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Geithner, was a lonely voice warning of the sub-prime mortgage bomb two years ago and he has both the experience and the youthful vigor to take on the most important job in the new Obama Administration.

On Defense, I am of two minds. I have written in recent weeks that Bob Gates understands some of the hard tasks that lay ahead in the remaking of our military to face the real threats of the 21st Century, not the cold war mentality of the 20th Century that many of the Generals are mired in. However, I still believe that Gates might be unwilling to make the real cuts in the Defense Budget. If Gates goes then Chuck Hagel, a Republican realist might be the right guy for the job. Hagel is a Vietnam vet and understands the foreign and defense policy challenges of our age. 

For the State Department, I think John Kerry would be a good choice. He has spent years in the foreign policy arena and has met most of the foreign leaders giving a sense of security to the rest of the world. I would feel even better if Barack appointed Samantha Power as one of the top NSC players. She went into self-imposed exile from the campaign after calling out the Clintons in the midst of a heated primary race. She is one of the great original foreign policy thinkers in America and Barack should bring her into his administration.