Yes, it’s not just a good idea, it’s the law! The Naval Vessel Transfer Act of 2008 amended the Arms Control Export Act of 1976 to require that any U.S. arms . . . → Read More: Because there aren’t nearly enough guns in the Middle East]]> What is “Why is the United States legally obligated to provide Israel with new military hardware whenever that nation feels a bit insecure?”

Yes, it’s not just a good idea, it’s the law! The Naval Vessel Transfer Act of 2008 amended the Arms Control Export Act of 1976 to require that any U.S. arms transactions in the Middle East do not affect Israel’s “ability to counter and defeat any credible conventional military threat from any individual state or possible coalition of states or from non-state actors, while sustaining minimal damages and casualties, through the use of superior military means, possessed in sufficient quantity, including weapons, command, control, communication, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities that in their technical characteristics are superior in capability to those of such other individual or possible coalition of states or non-state actors.”

There are of course two routes toward ensuring Israel’s military superiority. One is to refrain from selling weapons to those “individual or possible coalition of states” that might one day threaten Israel. The other is to sell those states those weapons and then give Israel the money and license to buy better ones. What to do, what to do.

In somewhat incredible news, we learn today that the Israeli government of today considers the Obama administration to be in some respects more user-friendly than the Bush administration, which was responsible for enshrining that commitment to Israel’s military superiority in US law. The current issue of The Forward has a story saying that although Obama is viewed by the Israeli public as less a friend than Bush, Israeli officials are more than pleased with the new US administration’s position on military relations between the two countries.

Israeli officials have been singing the praises of President Obama for his willingness to address their defense concerns and for actions taken by his administration to bolster Israel’s qualitative military edge — an edge eroded, according to Israel, during the final year of the George W. Bush presidency.
[...]
Amid the cacophony of U.S.-Israel clashes on the diplomatic front, public attention given to this intensified strategic cooperation has been scant. But in a rare public comment in October, Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren praised the Obama administration’s response to complaints about lost ground during the close of the Bush years as “warm and immediate.”

The lost ground in question relates to an astonishingly large arms deal, announced toward the end of 2007 by then-Secretary of State Condoleeeeeeezza Rice, that would inject $20 billion worth of new weapons and other military items into the Middle East over the course of the following 10 years. The purpose of the deal, according to Rice, was to “bolster forces of moderation and support a broader strategy to counter the negative influences of al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, Syria and Iran.” The countries set to by the US hardware were Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. (Bahrain, interestingly, has proportionately the largest military budget in the world at 11.5% of Gross Domestic Product, or at least that’s what it was at the time.)

At almost the same time as the US deal was announced, news leaked that the Brits were about to do their own giant arms deal in the vicinity.

The Ministry of Defence expects to sign a £20 billion contract with Saudi Arabia to supply 72 Eurofighter Typhoons within the next four weeks, The Times has learnt.

Negotiators are understood to be working towards an agreement before the month of Ramadan starts in mid-September and the deal could be completed as early as the end of this month.

The fighter jets will be built and supplied by BAE Systems, Europe’s largest defence company, as part of a government-to-government contract called al-Salam, or “Peace”.

Peace, bro.

(BAE was the British firm alleged to have bribed Saudi Prince Bandar in connection with a 1984 aircraft deal. The firm has since expanded into the US and become one of the top military contractors here, doing more than $9 billion in Pentagon business during 2007.)

So within the space of about a month, the peace-loving democratic peoples of the West revealed commitments to send $40 billion worth of shoot-em-up stuff to the Middle East. Hey, no wonder the Israelis were miffed at Bush, right?

Well, not exactly. The Israelis happily signed off on the US deal because it included $30 billion in military aid to Israel over the same period—50% more than the value of the sales to all the other countries combined. And knowledge of the Israeli green light isn’t something that would have slipped between the cracks during the transtion from Bush to Obama because the man in charge of the deal on the US end was Robert Gates, the then-and current “defense” secretary and middleman for the biggest and baddest arms dealer in the solar system.

Steve Rosen told The Forward that the Obama administration thinks supplying Israel with more, and more advanced, weaponry will increase the country’s fragile self-confidence and reduce the likelihood that it will attack Iran by enabling it to do so more effectively. Or words to that effect.

The magazine rather casually identifies Rosen only as “a former lobbyist for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee who is now a private consultant”; if his name sounds familiar it’s probably because he was indicted for espionage in one of the more bizarre national security fever dreams of the Bush administration. He now works for the neocon think tank Middle East Forum, where director Daniel Pipes has put him to work preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons, since no one else will do it.

Now, pay attention because this is really cute. Among the soothing gestures offered to Israel by the Obama administration is the opportunity to acquire a number of the very cool-looking F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Why is this cute? Because BAE, the company that manufactures the Eurofighter Typhoon that the Brits are selling to the Saudis, is a major partner in building the F-35—they’re building much of the airframe and a lot of the electronics—which if push comes to shove will be used by the Israelis to shoot down the Saudi Eurofighters. It’s not unusual for weapons makers to work both sides of a conflict, but it is somewhat out of the ordinary to find one involved in simultaneous multi-billion dollar sales of competing aircraft to potential opponents.

The Israelis are apparently looking to buy as many as 100 of these puppies at a price estimated to be in the vicinity of $100 million each, depending on how many orders Lockheed Martin, the primary manufacturer, can line up before going into production. The country’s first choice was a fleet of F-22s, but the US has to this point declined to make those available, perhaps holding off until we start selling F-35s to the Saudis and are required under the law to put Israel one up again.

The development costs for the F-35 recently topped a trillion dollars. That may sound like a lot of money but fortunately we’re pretty flush at the moment and it’s not as though we have anything better to spend it on, and anyway it’s worth it just to see the Israelis smile. I never imagined that the current administration would be better at bringing about that smile than the previous one.

UPDATE: Israel’s military budget is about 8% of the country’s GDP. The US throws in about another $2 billion annually in military aid, plus that billion over the next 10 years. One of the reasons Israel spends so much money on its military is that the US keeps selling weapons to everyone else in the region. Israel’s military spending is responsible in part for the continuing squeeze on the country’s social welfare program. So the US is pretty much directly screwing Israeli citizens for fun and profit. Some friends.

The . . . → Read More: Worst National Security Administration Ever: Wall Street Edition]]> Blaming our country’s woes exclusively on the people who have most directly wrought them—Bush, Cheney, torture maven David Addington et al—becomes increasingly difficult in the face of the refusal by Democratic party leaders to confer accountability, let alone make any attempt to visit some sort of necessarily inadequate justice, upon the administration.

The party’s presidential candidate, who agreeably opposes impeaching Bush and Cheney and seems no more than mildly interested in examining the genesis of our sorrows should he and his party consolidate control of the two elective branches, has just come out foursquare in favor of expanding the reach of a government that already has its national security tentacles embedded in what should be some very uncomfortable places, and he has endorsed at least two Congressional figures—practicing war lover Joe Lieberman, who is receiving favorable mention as a possible Republican vice-presidential candidate, over the anti-occupation Ned Lamont in 2006, and reactionary Georgia representative John Barrow over his progressive primary opponent, Regina Thomas, this year—who represent the antithesis of Barack Obama’s watchwords, “hope” and “change”. To continue the cephalopod analogy, he seems fully sympathetic to the notion of redaction as a survival technique, if one takes “survival” to mean “convenience”.

Obama did not, however, lay the keystone of a national security state, or invade Iraq, or greenlight torture, or threaten to carpet bomb Iran, or minister to the armed forces with a sledgehammer, or weaken the economy to the point that it has become its own threat to our collective security, and neither did other Vichy Democrats such as Jay Rockefeller, Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer and dozens of other administration enablers. They only helped; anything more than to shave their heads and shun them could be seen as an overreaction.

Obama, like Hillary Clinton and most other Democrats, has endorsed the idea of expanding the size of the Army and Marines by some 100,000 bodies. Unfortunately, so much equipment has been worn out, damaged or destroyed in service to the occupation of Iraq and the escalating war in Afghanistan that the military, primarily the two ground-bound branches but not excluding the Air Force and Navy, cannot afford to refurbish and replace mechanical goods at the same time as they embark on a costly and time consuming expansion of flesh and blood ones. Accordingly, sentiment at the Pentagon is running high in favor not of increasing the number of ground-bound combat troops, but of trimming the human ranks in favor of resuscitating the mechanical ones.

The obvious stumbling block to a streamlining is the military’s inability to maintain the occupation and prosecute the war with fewer troops under arms. The improvements in Iraq’s internal security, which have led to steep declines in kidnappings and violent occupation-related Iraqi deaths, from apocalyptic to merely horrifying—500 each month of the latter, down from as many as 1,500 or more in the salad days, and perhaps two dozen daily of the former, down from who knows how many—are dependent upon either a stable number of US troops and mercenaries, at present in the neighborhood of 150,000 and 50,000, respectively, or an actual functioning central government with functional Iraqi police and military organizations, prospects which seem as far beyond the horizon as ever.

In Afghanistan, where the Taliban and other anti-occupation forces appear to have taken a much longer view of the conflict than have the US and NATO, the increasingly petulant US cries for help from our once-again allies are a reflection of our own inability to bolster our own forces without dipping into that immutable number in Iraq. In both instances, expanding the Army and Marine Corps, a process that will cost upwards of $100 billion over perhaps five years—coincidentally, about what analysts say the Pentagon needs to recover from the equipment deficit—will come too late to have much impact on situations that we can reasonably guess will have deteriorated significantly by then. (The Pentagon, with characteristic modesty, places equipment repair and replacement costs closer to $50 billion.)

The Bush administration begat these problems but they now belong, for practical purposes, exclusively to the Pentagon and the next administration, which means that nothing will be done to address them for at least another six months, if then. Obama has made no coherent pledge to decrease the number of Americans under arms in Iraq, and has indicated his desire to increase the number in Afghanistan. John McCain has not been coherent about much of anything other than his cheery willingness to splash more blood whenever and wherever he can, including but not limited to those countries. Something, either the government’s and military’s commitments to the occupation and war or their shared allergy to a military draft, has to give.

In exchange, then, for whatever dubious accomplishments they can point to in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Bush administration have left us with a military that has been poised on the brink of physical collapse for several years, and that, even barring any additional misadventures, will require at least as many years more to recover; not necessarily a bad thing philosophically, but bad enough for the people who serve in it and in the unlikely event that we need it for staving off the invading Venezuelan hordes or some other, equally legitimate purpose.

Meanwhile, the administration have, according to Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker, embarked upon an increasingly rich and expensive variety of warlike moves against Iran, using CIA and special forces personnel inside Iran and funding various Iranian dissident groups, including one on the state department’s list of terrorist organizations—an exercise, whether aimed at genuinely destabilizing the Iranian regime or at provoking it into something approaching a reason to obliviate the country, or just for the hell of it, that might make slightly more sense, using whatever logic is required for it to make any sense at all, were not oil prices already spiking upward in the wake of the Iraq invasion and US threats against Iran, and were most of our ground forces not playing hostage in neighboring Iraq, surrounded by 20 million Shiite coreligionists along with Iran’s allies in Iraqi Kurdistan.

Much of Hersh’s story is not really news—most people who are aware of the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, the group designated as terrorists, know that the US gave them safe haven in Iraq after the invasion, and assumed that the US has been supporting them in operations against the Iranian government—and some of it is questioned by people of experience in the region. Hersh says that among the groups being employed by the administration are some that bear a startling resemblance to al Qaeda, but Laura Rozen notes that journalists who have spent time with the organizations in question have seen no signs of the new weapons or wealth that one could expect to result from US support, and says her sources suggest that the threats against Iran, and whatever support the US is providing to the regime’s internal opponents, reflect only an attempt to keep the ayatollahs off balance as the administration runs out the clock until Iran, like Iraq and Afghanistan, becomes someone else’s problem. One can only hope that Rozen’s account is the more accurate, as our last formal relationship with violent Sunni fundamentalists has not resolved to our long-term benefit.

Although the degree is disputed, no one worth reading argues that invading and occupying Iraq, and the debt incurred in service of the adventure, has not had an unfortunate impact on the US economy. Unemployment, which is far higher than the official statistics admit, and the credit meltdown, which is likewise more Dali-esque than most authorities admit, are not direct consequences of the occupation, unless one takes the housing and mortgage bubbles as reflections of our collective desire to be happy and not worry about the kinds of hell we’re visiting upon Iraqis, but other costs are more visibly associated with it.

Among those costs is oil. The fourfold rise in the price of oil since January 2003, to this point heroically absorbed by consumers, can be ascribed at least in part to the invasion and the subsequent rollout of the campaign to demonize Iran. Inflation and rising demand account for only a portion, larger or smaller depending upon which maven is speaking, of the rise. More expensive gasoline isn’t necessarily a bad thing, leading as it has to a growing conservation evangelism, a practice that vice president and Halliburton lobbyist Dick Cheney once dismissed as a private virtue but “not a sufficient basis for a sound, comprehensive energy policy.” But absent that sound, comprehensive energy policy, which eight years of the Bush administration has deliberately failed to produce, conservation is an act of desperation, and high gasoline prices are a drag on everyone’s economy who isn’t an oil company executive.

Increased defense spending is a drag as well, in both senses. Unlike spending on education, research or infrastructure, or even health care and other entitlement programs, government investment in products that represent the epitome of planned obsolescence—ones that blow up the very first time you use them—does not offer a high rate of return. In peaceful days, when defense dollars are used primarily as welfare for defense contractors, the return is better but not great. During wartime, every defense dollar is taxed by higher personnel costs; what money soldiers and their families inject into the economy is eroded by the expense of caring for the wounded and paying for the dead. A million troops have passed through Iraq, and fully a third or more of them have been killed, wounded, or traumatized to the point of requiring treatment, some for the rest of their lives, most with federal funds that will have to be borrowed and on which interest will have to be paid. A few years ago, economists Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes estimated the true cost of the Iraq invasion and occupation to be between $2 trillion and $3 trillion, an estimate that they increased to at least $3 trillion in their new book, and now say may approach $4 trillion-$5 trillion instead.

That’s a lot of money, even by Everett Dirksen’s “a billion here and a billion there” standard. Distributed across the US population today, it amounts to $13,000-$16,000 for everyone, man, woman and child, which would make one hell of an economic stimulus check even on the low end. Invested in the sort of government programs which return three or four dollars for each one spent, it would inject $12 trillion or more into the economy over a period of 30 or 40 years. National security depends on our ability to remain intellectually and commercially competetive with the rest of the world; the ability to do that depends upon the economy, which depends in turn upon the well being of our population and our infrastructure. Both are suffering, and will continue to suffer, in a variety of ways and for many years, from the absence of all that money—an absence that will inspire considerably more fondness than now if Cheney has his way and we actually attack Iran.

Although not by name, Rozen’s response to Hersh’s story includes an estimation that Condoleezza Rice’s tenure at the state department has served to blunt the influence of Dick Cheney, and that of the other violent demagogues in the administration, upon Bush with respect to Iran. For that to be true, Rice, who unaccountably continues to receive mention as a good option for filling out the McCain ticket, would have to be considerably more effective in her current post than in the previous one, where she presided over the intersection of diplomacy, defense and intelligence that led us into the hole from which she is now presumably trying to dig us out. The surprising deletion, presided over by Rice deputy Christopher Hill, of North Korea from the axis of countries we would probably attack if we weren’t so fully and bloodily occupied elsewhere lends credence to the idea, but Rice’s continuing insistence on the profound evilness of Iran’s leaders suggests that if she has become less amorphous, it’s nothing that a good dunking in a vat of neoconservative bile can’t fix. And it would be profoundly out of character for Bush and Cheney to avoid leaving the next president, especially if that looks to be Obama, with something other than a fait accompli regarding Iran.

In addition to breaking the Army and the economy, the Bush administration have broken the Constitution, something the courts have made hesitant attempts to remedy in the absence of any cohesive objections from congressional Democrats or, recently, from the party’s putative leader. One of Obama’s least successful primary opponents, Chris Dodd, recently gave voice to a classic Senate floor rant in response to the Obama-supported bill granting immunity to the behemoth telecommunications firm that broke the law, violated the Constitution, in service to the Bush administration. The closing of his speech was an indictment aimed squarely at his collaborationist Democratic colleagues, and is well worth repeating here.

My father, Senator Tom Dodd, was the number two American prosecutor at the famous Nuremberg trials. And I have never, never forgotten the example he set.

As Justice Robert Jackson said in his opening statement at Nuremberg: “That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury, stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to Reason.”

Mr. President, what is the tribute that Power owes to Reason?

That America stands for a transcendent idea.

The idea that laws should rule, not men.

The idea that the Constitution does not get suspended for vengeance.

The idea that this nation should never tailor its eternal principles to the conflict of the moment, because if we did, we would be walking in the footsteps of the enemies we despised.

The tribute that Power owes to Reason is due today. I know that we can find the strength to pay it. And if we can’t? We will all have to answer for it.

There’s a famous military recruiting poster that comes to mind. A man is sitting in an easy chair with his son and daughter on his lap, in some future after the war has ended. His daughter is asking him, “Daddy, what did you do in the war?” And his face is shocked and shamed, because he knows he did nothing.

My daughters, Grace and Christina, are six and three. They are growing up in a time of two great conflicts: one between our nation and its enemies, and another, between what is best and worst in our American soul. And someday soon, I know I am going to hear that question: “What did you do?” I want, more than anything else, to give the right answer.

That question is coming for every single one of us in this body. Every single one of us will be judged by a jury from whom there’s no hiding: our sons, our daughters, our grandchildren. Someday soon, they’ll read in their textbooks the story of a great nation, one that threw down tyrants and oppressors for two centuries; one that rid the world of Nazism and Soviet communism; one that proved that great strength can serve great virtue, that right can truly make might.

And then they will read how, in the early years of the 21st century, that nation lost its way.

We do not have the power to strike that chapter. No, Mr. President—we can’t go back.

We can’t un-destroy the CIA’s interrogation tapes. We can’t un-pass the Military Commissions Act. We can’t un-speak Alberto Gonzales’s disgraceful testimony. We can’t un-torture innocent people. And perhaps, sadly, shamefully, we cannot stop retroactive immunity. We can’t un-do anything that has been done in the last six years for the cause of lawlessness and fear.

We cannot blot out that chapter. But we can begin the next one, even today. Let its first words read: “Finally, in June 2008, the Senate said: ‘Enough.’”

The Senate, of course, has yet to say, “Enough”, although the ghost of a chance remains once the bill in question is put to a vote after, ironically, the July 4th holiday, the one where we celebrate our freedom and, whether spoken or not, its fount, the Constitution. All indications are that when the Senate reconvenes, its members will do as the House has done, and as Barack Obama now recommends, which is to approve legislation that at its heart undermines the principle, which now appears to be little more than a conceit, that legislation, and by unfortunate implication legislators, are an essential element of governance.

By which I mean, “What Chris Dodd said.”

Take Condoleezza Rice, for instance. As Bush’s national security council chief, she presided over the administration’s total lack of interest . . . → Read More: Not just the worst president ever: worst cabinet secretaries too]]> George W. Bush has a death grip on the title of Worst US President Ever, but he’s not alone in achieving historic levels of incompetence: his cabinet secretaries are pulling their weight as well.

Take Condoleezza Rice, for instance. As Bush’s national security council chief, she presided over the administration’s total lack of interest in counter-terrorism activities. It was Rice, you’ll recall, who referred in testimony before the 9/11 commission to the Presidential Daily Brief entitled “Bin Laden Determined To Strike In US” as a “historical document” unworthy of notice.

Today, we receive official notice that as secretary of state, Rice set out to do for diplomacy what she did for national security. Vanity Fair has the documentary scoop on a scheme concoted by Rice and Iran-Contra convict Elliot Abrams to provoke a civil war in Palestine between the military wings of Hamas, the democratically elected ruling party much loathed by the Bush administration, and Fatah, the electoral losers who were loathed by the administration when in power but gained respectability by virtue of losing.

In true Bush-like fashion, and with the president’s blessing, Rice and Abrams not only set out to provoke a war but backed the losing side. They had no idea Hamas would win the Palestinian general election, which they had pressured Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas to call despite his concerns that Hamas was better organized and more popular than his Fatah movement, and once Hamas did win, they completely underestimated Hamas’s popularity while overestimating Fatah’s strength. And of course they selected as the vehicle of their dreams a man, Gaza warlord and long-time Fatah enforcer Muhammad Dahlan, whom the president and other senior administration officials had met and assessed as a man they could do business with.

The lone named Bush administration source in the story contemporary to the events under discussion is former Cheney aide David Wurmser, a staunch neoconservative who was central to the administration’s efforts to promote the invasion of Iraq. Ironically, after two decades of advocating various forms of violence and subversion as a solution to the region’s problems, Wurmser complained to writer David Rose of a “stunning disconnect between the president’s call for Middle East democracy” and the Rice-Abrams scheme.

Here’s what Rice had to say about the Hamas electoral sweep. “I’ve asked why nobody saw it coming. I don’t know anyone who wasn’t caught off guard by Hamas’s strong showing.” But news accounts from the months before the election describe Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas’s anxiety over his party’s fading popularity, a concern that led him to postpone the elections once and which proved to be well-founded. Had she read the newspapers, she would have known. And Dahlan, the administration’s point man for the Fatah coup, says he was telling everyone he knew in the administration that Fatah wasn’t ready for elections.

Rice’s statement about the Hamas victory is spookily reminiscent of her claim that no one could have predicted that terrorists would use hijacked airliners as weapons, even though US intelligence agencies had predicted exactly that. (And score one for pop culture, too: the pilot episode of X-Files spinoff The Lone Gunmen, which aired six months before 911 in March of 2001, featured a terrorist plot to fly a hijacked airliner into the World Trade Center. Clearly, administration officials don’t watch enough TV.)

Rice was also warned that despite its evident superiority in numbers, Fatah’s security forces were splintered, poorly motivated and highly unpopular, but despite years of accumulating evidence from the US experience with arming and training similarly dysfunctional forces in Iraq, she chose to believe that the US proxy in Palestine could carry the day.

Vanity Fair presents its revelation of the Rice plot as something of a scoop, but the only real news is the documentary evidence the reporter uncovered. In point of fact, as we noted at the time, the administration signalled their intention well in advance (“Iraq isn’t going well; how about a civil war in Palestine?”), and were transparently involved once the fighting between Hamas and Fatah broke out in earnest (“Finally, a Bush administration success in Palestine: civil war”). If the Vanity Fair story comes as a surprise, one can chalk it up to the traditional failure of the US institutional press to adequately cover both the administration and the Middle East generally.

The Palestine misadventure is only one of the chapters catapulting Rice into contention for worst secretary of state ever; it’s among a series of situations in which she embraces a bad idea and executes it as incompetently as possible. She may not have her position as thoroughly locked up as Bush has his, but she stands alone by virtue of also qualifying as a finalist in the category of worst national security advisor ever. It’s a matter of some regret to us that she decided not to run for president or vice president and thus throw her hat into those rings as well.

No, U.S. secretary of state Condoleezza Rice didn’t pull the trigger or build the bomb or hire the assassin, but it was the U.S. effort to force Pakistan’s dictator, Pervex Musharraf, into a power-sharing arrangement with Bhutto that led directly to her death.

Steve Clemons, proprietor of the Washington Note and . . . → Read More: A brief comment on the assasination of Benazir Bhutto]]> Condi did it.

No, U.S. secretary of state Condoleezza Rice didn’t pull the trigger or build the bomb or hire the assassin, but it was the U.S. effort to force Pakistan’s dictator, Pervex Musharraf, into a power-sharing arrangement with Bhutto that led directly to her death.

Steve Clemons, proprietor of the Washington Note and an up-and-coming member of the bipartisan foreign policy establishment, neatly encapsulated the mindset of that establishment when he wrote today, in response to the news, that “there is a genuine question of whether America should have been meddling with the internal dynamics of Pakistan’s political situation.”

The question rests on the assumption that we have the right to meddle, with the caveat being whether it’s good for us or not. It’s a question no one would even think to ask were it applied to us. Consider: “There is a genuine question of whether China should have been meddling with the internal dynamics of America’s political situation.”

Is there?

[A]t his very first meeting . . . → Read More: Bush and Putin’s soul: a masterpiece of product placement]]> My friend Cell Whitman emailed me a few days ago about a C-SPAN interview with the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler. Kessler was discussing U.S. – Soviet relations, and the difficulties they present putative Russia expert Condoleezza Rice, when he let fly with this little gem about Bush and Putin:

[A]t his very first meeting with Putin, Putin told [Bush] a story about a cross that he had blessed in Israel that used to belong to his grandmother. People that are aware of this conversation at the State Department feel that the President got played by Putin. There is no cross. There was just some KGB story that he made up. But it had a real impact on President Bush. That’s when he walked out and said, ‘I looked into his soul and decided this is the guy I can work with.’ And for the longest time in the first term, if you talked to then National Security Adviser Rice, she always painted the relationship with Russia in very rosy terms. …”

Weep and pray: four years of our Russia policy were shaped by Putin superimposing a cross between himself and Bush’s gaze. The Putin-Bush press conference in which Bush made his remarks about Putin’s soul is here.