In both his speech and his actions, Obama’s disapproval of the surge in Iraq, and now in Afghanistan, is obvious. But he made Afghanistan ‘his war’ long ago and long before his speech yesterday night. In an effort to capitalize on the unpopularity and ongoing debate over the Iraq war, he emphasized Afghanistan as the right and necessary war on the campaign trail. While he’s backtracked on many issues (didn’t you hear that the stimulus wasn’t a jobs bill?), the public pressure from his own generals, the lives at stake (both of our military abroad and our own at home) made it necessary for him to step to the plate on this issue.

But, instead of laying out a strategy for success, he dilly-dallied, more concerned with his standing among his fellow liberals than with winning in Afghanistan (which, as everyone has pointed out, he made no mention of yesterday evening.) His big announcement: a surge of 30,000 soldiers in Afghanistan to be executed quickly, but they will all begin to be pulled out by July of 2011. I do agree that given this President’s tendency to govern through loopholes, the world ‘begin’ is of importance — as a way for Obama to get out of this commitment (see update below) if things are going badly in Afghanistan, AND public opinion supports remaining there when the time comes. (After all, public opinion means more to this President than results.)

What if a local politician were to announce an increase in law enforcement and resources to crack down on gang activity and violence in a particularly rough neighborhood, while simultaneously choosing an arbitrary timeline down the road at which all such resources would be pulled. What do you think the bad guys would do in the meantime? What would happen on that pullout date?

Michelle Malkin reports that Charles Krauthammer called the speech “strange” and “uncertainty compounding uncertainty.” To those observations, I’d like to add my own — that the President is a afraid of commitment. Instead of taking a side on Afghanistan, either the generals’ or of those advocating complete withdrawal, he tried to appease both groups. This strategy is more than just confusing, it’s unstable and ultimately, potentially very dangerous.

Update: Well, that didn’t take long. Just a few hours after posting this, the administration started backtracking on the withdrawal date and emphasizing that any withdrawal would be contingent upon certain conditions being met on the ground. Less than 24 hours after laying out his strategy, the President has already started backing away from yet another promise.

While I would like to commend the President and the administration for changing tactics and perhaps listening to critics who found their withdrawal plan unwise, it’s hard to take any of their promises at face value. Who knows what word play they may rely on tomorrow to escape responsibility for some other commitment?

Of course, I quickly realized that this wasn’t a joke. And to my surprise, the response of most people I spoke to wasn’t based on politics. People on the left and right questioned the Nobel committee’s decision and wondered what they had up their sleeve, nominating a President only 11 days into his Presidency.

As the news continued to break, the stories of the runners-up started coming out. And today, the WSJ published a short but powerful piece, suggesting the ridiculousness of giving this award to President Obama. In terms of making strides towards peace in the world, the President does not have any accomplishments to point to. Some would argue his apology tour earlier this year set the stage for a new kind of engagement with other countries. This still doesn’t explain the conferral of this prize, given that the nomination came just 11 days into his Presidency.

The WSJ focuses on what might have been had the prize gone to an individual or group of people, fighting for peace, who don’t have a voice on the international stage. The writer wonders whether this award could have brought attention to the plight of those who marched for freedom in Iran, and now face Iranian courts who have zero tolerance for dissent.

“Suppose this year’s Nobel Peace Prize had gone to the scores of Iranians now on trial for having protested the fraudulent re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad last June. For the three defendants who were sentenced to death over the weekend, a Nobel might have made all the difference in the nick of time. At a minimum, it could have validated their struggle.

Our friends in Oslo had a different idea, which means that the fate of the three defendants—known officially by their initials M.Z., A.P. and N.A.—are at the mercy of Iran’s appellate and supreme courts. It’s a slender hope in a country that is the leading executioner of juveniles, and whose leaders have only become more truculent toward dissenters since the election.

Hope is also slender because the Obama Administration has downplayed human rights in Iran as it pursues a negotiated nuclear settlement with the Ahmadinejad government. Without explanation, the State Department this month pulled funding for the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, a New Haven, Connecticut outfit that has been investigating the plight of those Iranians now in the dock, including Iranian-American scholar Kian Tajbakhsh and Newsweek reporter Maziar Bahari.

In his Rose Garden remarks about the Nobel, President Obama spoke about “the young woman who marches silently in the streets on behalf of her right to be heard even in the face of beatings and bullets.” The elliptical reference is almost certainly to 27-year old Neda Agha-Sultan, whose murder last June by one of Ahmadinejad’s goon squads was captured on a video seen around the world. We hope the President keeps in mind that the same people whose good faith he now seeks in negotiations were her killers.”

With just a week to go before talks with Iran continue regarding its nuclear enrichment plans, this reminder for the President and for his entire administration is relevant and poignant. So far, President Obama has not taken any hard stances against Iran — issuing lukewarm statements when protesters took to the streets after what they believed was a fraudulent election and doing the same just a couple weeks ago when it was brought to light that Iran had a second nuclear enrichment facility.

As the article suggests, President Obama referenced Neda, the young Iranian girl the world saw shot in cold blood while standing by watching the protests. Let’s hope he honors her memory by remembering who is fighting for peace in Iran, and who stands against them.

His remarks are almost two times as long as Sarkozy and Brown’s. But, what was his message?

I read through the remarks, searching for the strongest language used by each leader.

This is what I took to be President Obama’s strongest articulation:

“Through this dialogue, we are committed to demonstrating that international law is not an empty promise; that obligations must be kept; and that treaties will be enforced.”

President Sarkozy:

“I repeated my conviction that Iran was taking the international community on a dangerous path.

We cannot let the Iranian leaders gain time while the motors are running. If by December there is not an in-depth change by the Iranian leaders, sanctions will have to be taken.”

Prime Minister Brown:

“As President Obama and President Sarkozy have just said, the level of deception by the Iranian government, and the scale of what we believe is the breach of international commitments, will shock and anger the whole international community, and it will harden our resolve.”

Notice a pattern? In the order I’ve posted the comments above (which is the same order they were presented in), the firmness with which each leader reacts to Iran’s duplicitous actions gets progressively stronger — with President Obama’s statement being the most mellow.

With all that’s on the line and the real possibility of Israel attacking Iran preemptively, President Obama needs to get tougher on Iran and bolder in his language, not just because they have explicitly defied the UN, but even more importantly, because they have repeatedly provoked the US on the international stage.

A gratuitous note/personal opinion:
As a lawyer, I can vouch for the fact that law school and the practice of law teach and require you to communicate in an unnatural voice, constantly qualifying the arguments you make. That may work in a brief or in a court room when you’re appealing to a judge and want your argument to come across strongly, but moderately enough to not tick the judge off. President Obama’s background is rooted in this balancing act, but as President, that kind of rhetoric won’t cut it. Especially not in the face of the danger of nuclear weapons landing in the hands of anti-American, anti-Israeli, anti-capitalist and generally, anti-Western fundamentalists.

The contrast between his speech and President Obama’s speech is striking. Our President started off his speech like a campaign speech, spending too much time talking about himself, apologizing for America’s past and showcasing the changes he’s made, strongly implying that America is ready to take its relations with the rest of the world seriously now, as if this wasn’t the case before.

Here’s the text of Netanyahu’s speech posted by Michael Goldfarb over at The Weekly Standard’s blog.

Here’s the President’s speech from earlier this week.

You decide.

The President remarked:

“Let us renew our resolve against those who perpetrated this barbaric act and who plot against us still. In defense of our nation we will never waver; in pursuit of al Qaeda and its extremist allies, we will never falter.

Most of all, on a day when others sought to sap our confidence, let us renew our common purpose.

This may be the greatest lesson of this day, the strongest rebuke to those who attacked us, the highest tribute to those taken from us — that such sense of purpose need not be a fleeting moment.”

The strongest words he used in his entire speech were ‘barbaric’, ‘extremist’ and ‘attack”. He didn’t mention the words murder, terrorism or war in his speech. “On a day when others sought to sap our confidence,” he said.

To sap our confidence? Doesn’t he mean on a day when innocent American lives were specifically targeted by terrorists? And that those terrorists wanted to make us tremble in fear to spread their suicidal message of Jihad? That is, to show the world that the American ‘infidels’ had hell to pay for our very way of life?

The President stayed away from using any such harsh language. But, “sap our confidence”? Surely, he could have chosen words better suited to show that on his first 9/11, he stood with the victims, the families of the victims and with the rest of America in opposition to these deathmongers who instigated the deadliest attack on our soil in history.

But, the excerpt above was the extent of his mentioning the 9/11 attackers. I could only shake my head reading and rereading the President’s comments. Just a few days ago, he spoke about his health care proposals more passionately than he did about the attacks on 9/11.

This prompted me to write this tweet:

“Chilling, hard to listen to. http://bit.ly/11Mrf8 Yet a reminder of the evil, not barbaric Mr. Pres. ,but evil that killed so many innocent.

I wrote that on 9/11. And I tried to bite my tongue for the rest of that day. And, it’s for that reason that I’m posting this on 9/12, because I believe 9/11 should be a day reserved for remembering and honoring those whose were brutally and suddenly taken from their loved ones. 9/11 is a day we should all strive to remember what unites us, not what divides us.

So today, I’d like to share some of my thoughts on our President. The truth is, I disagree with President Obama’s policies almost across the board. My convictions and my vision for the country are fundamentally opposed to the big-government policies Obama espouses.

But, when I disagree with someone’s politics, I try to remind myself that while the means may vary, our intentions, on the left and on the right, are the same — to implement policies that we believe are right for our country. I have reminded myself of this often since the President’s days on the campaign trail because even then, when his rhetoric was more centrist, I saw him as an extreme leftist that would push our country in a totally new direction if elected, as he promised — or threatened depending on your view of him.

But, I’m not so sure I can give our President this benefit of the doubt anymore. I don’t know if his decisions are based on what’s best for the country, what’s best for the politicians in Washington or what’s best for certain groups of people he backs, like unions for example. From his decision to appoint Eric Holder, who orchestrated the pardoning of Puerto Rican nationalist terrorists by going so far as to write their apologies when they refused to, to his decision to close Guantanamo and strip the CIA of the power to question suspects who are deemed national security threats (without undertaking any examination of the strategies and reasoning behind the former administration’s decisions), I don’t know that he sees the world as I do. That he sees America as many of us do. That he takes threats to our national security as seriously as he should. Or really, when it comes down to it, that he loves and respects America.

It seems that he exploits every opportunity he has to centralize power, even stripping the CIA and the military of their authority where he can.

While our President opted out of visiting New York City on the anniversary of 9/11, he penned an op-ed in The New York Post. He stated:

“And in the policies and principles that guide our efforts, we are reaffirming a simple truth: that our strength as a nation comes not only from the might of our military, but also the power of our fundamental values.”

I recognize that this President is seen as a supreme communicator, and maybe this is just too far above my pragmatic head, but what does this mean? His op-ed must be understood within the context of 9/11, in which he remembers what began our current struggle against the “real and present danger posed by violent extremists who would use terrorism against Americans.” And so, he continues reassuring the reader that his administration is “providing the necessary resources and strategies to take the fight to the extremists.” And, he goes down the list of measures: investing in intelligence and military capabilities, increasing the Army and Marine Corps, making efforts toward securing non-proliferation, building partnerships with allies and then he concludes by talking about these “fundamental values” and our “common sense of purpose” that he says provide us strength to defend ourselves alongside our military’s might.

So I have to ask, how does pitting the Attorney General against the CIA strengthen us? How does creating a new interrogation task force to be overseen by the FBI, instead of the CIA, strengthen us? How does spending more than all of the Presidents in our history combined strengthen us? How does backing legislation that deprives workers of the right to vote on unionizing via secret ballot strengthen us? What fundamental values do these policies suggest, and how do they strengthen our nation in our ongoing wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and the larger war on terror throughout the world? How do they strengthen us in fighting against violent, Jihadist terrorists that seek our demise?

President Obama has been hailed as one of the greatest communicators of our time. As you can probably tell by now, I don’t find this to be true. I think the utopian speech he uses, with its grand gestures, leaves much to be desired, particularly in the way of specifics. And I believe that this vague manner of speaking has started working against him — first when it came to spending and the stimulus, then with regard to the debate over health care this summer and yesterday, on 9/11.

These questions, about the President’s intentions, about his view of America, the Constitution, individual liberty and economic freedom — these are questions every American needs to ask themselves. And on 9/11, I found myself wondering if President Obama believes, like his spiritual mentor of twenty years, Rev. Wright, that America had it coming? Does he believe that those terrorists that murdered so many in cold blood on that day were pure evil, not just barbaric and uncivilized as he stated, but cold and calculating evildoers? Had he not found himself in the middle of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, how would he have responded on 9/11? Does he believe in the Afghanistan war as he says he does, or is he just an opportunist who knew that the ‘war of necessity’ in Afghanistan would read better to those answering the polls?

I don’t know the answers to all of these questions. But, I do know that when you stack them up side by side, the facts start to paint a picture of a President whose intentions for the country are to take it in a direction so different from our deep-rooted traditions. That is why all those people marched in Washington and throughout the country today, because they believe, like I do, that this country, this great melting pot that was built on freedom is the greatest country in the world. And I don’t believe anymore that this President agrees.

Here is a portrait of Mary Jo published in The New York Times.

Mary Jo Kimelman: ‘Time Out New York,’ Live
Published: Saturday, December 8, 2001

Whenever friends or friends of friends came to town, Mary Jo Kimelman eagerly became their tour guide. She knew so much about happenings in New York City that her mother once called her “Time Out New York,” after the magazine.

Ms. Kimelman, 34, was always a taker when people had an extra ticket to concerts or sporting events. She often read poetry at clubs in Greenwich Village and ran up on stage when bands invited audience members to sing. About two years ago, Ms. Kimelman impressed her friends by belting out a Melissa Etheridge tune at a bar near Wall Street. “At the beginning she was a little nervous,” said her friend Carolynn Kutz. “But once she started going, she let it rip. The band helped her along and she shined.”

Ms. Kimelman was passionate about photography and travel and was particularly smitten with Paris. She mused about getting executives at Cantor Fitzgerald, where she worked as a volume control clerk, to transfer her there. “We always got a kick out of that,” said her [step]mother, Pat Kimelman. “I said, `Mary, maybe you should learn to speak French first. You should go to London.’ But she happened to like Paris better.”

In addition to being her own “Time Out New York”, Mary Jo’s mother, Terre Wallach, recalled, “no one had more fun than Mary Jo.”

Her stepmother said, “She could be a kid with the kids … crawl around the floor and make them laugh.”

And she had plenty of opportunity to let the kid inside of her out when she spent time with her six nieces and nephews.

When she wasn’t hitting the town or sharing laughs with her family, Mary Jo poured her heart out through her writing. Her choice of medium was poetry. Her boyfriend, Thierry LeBras, recalled that just before 9/11, she had read her poetry at a show in the East Village.

“She wrote about everything,” her mother said. “She shared her father’s interest in food and wine. She had so many interests.”

Mary Jo wore her heart on her sleeve. She was always there for everyone. Her boyfriend said, “She had this special talent of listening to people that she had just met. She would talk [to them] about their lives.”

And, she would talk to co-workers about her life and how she dreamed of being transferred to work in Paris. Her family would tease her, saying she should explore other options, that she should visit London first. But Paris had a special place in Mary Jo’s heart.

Mary Jo was taken away well before her time, but she embraced life and had a vivacious spirit that we remember today. They say it doesn’t matter how one dies, but how one lives. And Mary Jo lived her life to the fullest and touched everyone she met during her young 34 years.

She would have been 42 years old this year. She might have published her poetry. Had a family of her own. Taken that trip to London. Maybe even moved to Paris. But a group of people who didn’t know Mary Jo, or her father Michael Kimelman, her mother Terre Wallach, her sister Dara Berliner or her brothers Michael and Scott Kimelman, set off a chain of events that took the lives of Mary Jo and 2,9995 other victims 8 years ago today.

Today we remember and honor Mary Jo. I hope that Mary Jo’s family has found some comfort, and I know that she is watching over them with that same vibrant spirit she had here on earth. We will never forget you. May you rest in peace Mary Jo.

*To read more tributes to the victims of 9/11, visit Project 2,996 and Friends of Project 2,996.

In addition to concerns about the CIA’s reputation and its legal exposure, other White House insiders say Panetta has been frustrated by what he perceives to be less of a role than he was promised in the administration’s intelligence structure. Panetta has reportedly chafed at reporting through the director of National Intelligence, Dennis Blair, according to the senior adviser who said Blair is equally unhappy with Panetta. “Leon will be leaving,” predicted a former top U.S. intelligence official, citing the conflict with Blair. The former official said Panetta is also “uncomfortable” with some of the operations being carried out by the CIA that he did not know about until he took the job.”

Indeed. With Holder appointing a prosecutor to investigate the CIA and the announcement of a new unit in charge of interrogations, who could blame Panetta? What’s the point of putting your own guy in charge of the CIA if you’re just going to go around him anyway? It’ll be interesting to see how long Mr. Panetta sticks around and what stories will come out about the tensions between him and the White House along the way. Here is a statement Panetta issued to the agency today (in response to the disclosure of an Inspector General report from 2004):

“I make no judgments on the accuracy of the 2004 IG report or the various views expressed about it. Nor am I eager to enter the debate, already politicized, over the ultimate utility of the Agency’s past detention and interrogation effort. But this much is clear: The CIA obtained intelligence from high-value detainees when inside information on al-Qa’ida was in short supply.

Whether this was the only way to obtain that information will remain a legitimate area of dispute, with Americans holding a range of views on the methods used. The CIA requested and received legal guidance and referred allegations of abuse to the Department of Justice. President Obama has established new policies for interrogation.”

If the administration has already decided that investigators must abide by the Army Field Manual while conducting interrogations, what’s the point of this new department? The optimist in me tried to read between the lines, wondering if this could be another example of the administration governing through loopholes.

What I mean is for a second, I wondered if this could be a signal, an admission from the administration that every situation is different, and that when lives are in danger, civilian or military, sometimes the rules of the Army Field Manual just might not cut it. But, my hopes were shattered later on in the article. The entire structure has apparently been set up, if I understand it correctly, to work as a sort of liaison on behalf of detainees, to ensure that they are not ‘tortured’ and that, when they are sent back to their mother countries, that they have a safe trip.

With the economy in decline, the deficit projections having been increased by another $2 trillion, unemployment on the rise, states’ budgets sinking deeper into the red, and citizens up in arms in fear of the government taking over the health care industry, the Obama administration is spending it’s time looking after the rights of terror suspects. Which brings me to another issue, why is this task force necessary at all? Isn’t that what we have the CIA for?

Even with Obama distancing himself from policies implemented by the CIA during the Bush administration, he has his own guy in there now. It seems like everyone has their hand in this new unit except for Leon Panetta. What happened to moving forward? This seems like another situation in which the President’s rhetoric and his actions don’t match up.

“The Obama administration’s adoption of the stonewalling tactics and opaque policies of the Bush administration flies in the face of the president’s stated desire to restore the rule of law, to revive our moral standing in the world and to lead a transparent government.”

And so went the ACLU’s outraged reaction to the President’s announcement that he has decided to reverse course and fight the release of pictures depicting the abuse of detainees. What struck me as interesting is the fact that the administration had no problems releasing Office of Legal Counsel memos detailing the interrogation methods employed during the previous administration, but it drew the line at this group of pictures.

In his statement on the subject yesterday, President Obama identified the pictures as “associated with closed investigations of the alleged abuse of detainees in our ongoing war effort.” In other words, he was quick to point out that these pictures are different than what was disclosed in the memos in that the behavior exhibited in these pictures is now being investigated as being improper. But then he went on to say that the photos “are not particularly sensational”.

It’s a big jump from ‘these photos depict alleged abuses’ to ‘they’re not that sensational’. Obama then proceeded to inform us that the pictures do not conform to the Army Field Manual’s standards. Is this because of the abuse or because the behavior depicted was acceptable under Bush but not Obama? If the latter is the case, one would think that President Obama would be as quick to release these photos as he was the memos in an effort to distance himself from the former President and what was acceptable during his term.

Also, if the pictures would put our troops and people in great danger, why was the administration scheduled to release the pictures up until yesterday? Just a few weeks ago on April 23, the Justice Department wrote a letter to Judge Allen K. Hellerstein, the judge in the Southern District of NY handling the case, explaining their intention to fully cooperate with the previous judgment in the case and release the pictures by May 28^th.

What explains the change of heart? And, why release the memos but not the pictures? Last month, we were told that the administration had resigned itself to releasing the pictures because it did not believe the Supreme Court would hear the case and reverse the appellate court’s judgment. Nothing other than the administration’s position has changed since then. As a matter of fact, the new grounds that the administration intends to argue to keep the pictures from the public won’t work for a number of reasons, as Politico reports. First, the administration will not be allowed to present new arguments on national security grounds as Robert Gibbs suggested because only matters of law may be brought up on appeal, not matters of fact or new arguments. Second, according to an ACLU lawyer, the Bush administration already made the national security arguments that Gibbs referred to.

Finally, as Andrew C. McCarthy of National Review points out, Pres. Obama could have kept these pictures out of the limelight by either issuing an executive order or having Congress pass a statute to that effect, rather than proceeding with the matter through the legal process where there are no guarantees. And if Obama has been forthcoming about his reason for choosing not to release the pictures, namely because they would put our people in even more danger than they already face, then why wouldn’t he exercise one of these options and put an end to this issue?

One possibility for why the President chose to reverse course and keep these pictures hidden may be because of the power of these images – particularly given this administration’s focus on remaking the White House brand. In order for the President to reconcile releasing the memos but not the pictures, he had to make the case for why the pictures are different. The President failed in reconciling his actions. By doing so, he earned the displeasure of his supporters on the left and also left his more skeptical constituents once against wondering what his true intentions are and whether this was just another distraction since it is more likely than not that the appellate court’s decision will ultimately be upheld and the pictures released in time.

On the issue of non-military aid, Zardari complains that the $1.5 billion a year in non-military aid (for 5 years) that the U.S. has offered to help Pakistan is not enough. The U.S. offer comes as part of the administration’s plan to make extremism a less desirable option to Pakistanis. Said Zardari, “this aid package is not even one-tenth of what you give AIG.” And on the conditions in the legislation passed by the House in exchange for giving, not lending Pakistan this money, Zardari likened this to “doubting an ally”.

This sounds just a little pushy for the leader of a country where the Taliban recently made its way to within one hour of the capital, Islamabad. Mr. Zardari may have been democratically elected, but his approval ratings are dismal, and Pakistan’s government has yet to become stabilized. There is even talk of the U.S. backing Nawaz Sharif, a former political opponent of Mr. Zardari who is viewed by some as being too close to extreme Islamists to lead Pakistan. Bringing stability to Pakistan is critical, but Mr. Zardari would be smart to cooperate with the U.S. and avoid playing hardball at a time when his country needs us both for their economic development and more importantly, to lend in a hand in keeping them safe.