I really do not think Obama should offer Senator Clinton Secretary of State myself but I do not have a strong feeling about it one way or the other. I do have a strong feeling, as I have, since 2006, about Bill Richardson. The man should not be allowed near any job with actual responsibility. He is not smart. He is not rigorous. He is, imo, a fool. John Kerry is 10 times the candidate for Secretary of State that Richardson is. And I am no big fan of John Kerry.

Speaking for me only

This is big news if true:

President-elect Barack Obama offered Sen. Hillary Clinton the position of Secretary of State during their meeting Thursday in Chicago, according to two senior Democratic officials. She requested time to consider the offer, the officials said.

Whether or not the United States is spying on Bolivia, it is wasting its money in efforts to suppress native farmers who try to make a living by growing coca.

President Evo Morales said Saturday that Bolivia does not need U.S. help to control its coca crop, stepping up his anti-Washington rhetoric days after rejecting an American request to fly an anti-drug plane over the South American nation's territory. Morales also compared U.S. counter-drug efforts in the country, including Drug Enforcement Administration flights, to espionage.

"It's important that the international community knows that here, we don't need control of the United States on coca cultivation," the president told a gathering of coca farmers. "We can control ourselves internally. We don't need any spying from anybody.

Both countries have played politics by booting out the other country's ambassador. The United States placed Bolivia on an anti-narcotics blacklist. Other than encouraging anti-American rhetoric in South America, what does this failed policy accomplish? Nada. [more ...]

Some commenters have cited this White House document as a delineation of the Bush Doctrine. The key portion I think is this:

For centuries, international law recognized that nations need not suffer an attack before they can lawfully take action to defend themselves against forces that present an imminent danger of attack. Legal scholars and international jurists often conditioned the legitimacy of preemption on the existence of an imminent threat—most often a visible mobilization of armies, navies, and air forces preparing to attack.

We must adapt the concept of imminent threat to the capabilities and objectives of today’s adversaries. Rogue states and terrorists do not seek to attack us using conventional means. They know such attacks would fail. Instead, they rely on acts of terror and, potentially, the use of weapons of mass destruction—weapons that can be easily concealed, delivered covertly, and used without warning.

MORE . . .

Kevin Drum notes that while Sarah Palin echoes the irresponsible McCain position on the expansion of NATO to Georgia, the Democrats have not a leg to stand on on the issue:

John McCain's official position on NATO expansion is that we should include Georgia and Ukraine posthaste. This means that if either of those countries gets into a border skirmish — or worse — with Russia, the United States will be obligated to go to war on their behalf.

However, unless I'm mistaken, this is also Barack Obama's official position. So I wouldn't expect a whole lot of pushback on this from his camp. Which is too bad, since the American public really ought to think long and seriously about whether we should be reponsible for defending distant countries that have long histories of ethnic strife and unstable borders.

The only "Serious Person" who has made sense on this issue is Sam Nunn:

I always thought Roger Cohen was not the sharpest knife in the drawer and this column on NATO, Georgia and the Ukraine proves it. Interestingly, Cohen starts well:

In retrospect the NATO summit declaration of April 3 about Georgia and Ukraine seems almost criminal in its irresponsibility: “We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO.” That lofty commitment emerged from a Bucharest meeting so split over the two countries’ aspirations to enter the Atlantic alliance that it could not even agree to offer the first step toward joining, the Membership Action Plan that prepares nations for NATO.

(Emphasis supplied.) Absolutely. So what does Cohen suggest NATO do?

at the NATO foreign ministers’ meeting in December, it should replace Bucharest blather with basics: a Membership Action Plan for Georgia and Ukraine.

Say what? To coin a phrase, that would be "criminal irresponsibility." Does Cohen think we do not have enough wars to fight right now? More . . .

The world is a dangerous place:

More than 60 people were killed Thursday when two suicide bombers attacked Pakistan’s largest weapons manufacturing complex, just north of the capital, the deadliest attack by the Taliban in their escalating campaign against the government.

The attack came just days after the resignation of President Pervez Musharraf left two rival political parties in the governing coalition haggling over the question of succession and added a new layer of turbulence to an unstable, nuclear-armed nation. Neither party has been eager to take on the campaign against the militants, which is seen here as an American conflict foisted on Pakistan.

Some "Serious People" think we do not have enough issues in the world and need to take on Russia by expanding NATO to Georgia and the Ukraine. I disagree.

NATO sent a sternly worded letter to Russia. Russia responds with stern implied threats of its own:

Doubts surfaced over the future of military cooperation between NATO and Russia on Wednesday after Norway said Moscow had informed it of a decision to freeze all joint work with the alliance in the row over Georgia. However Russia's ambassador to NATO played down any future steps, saying the decisions were "of temporary character, of regional character, not global character."

[More...]

Here are "the consequences":

NATO agreed after U.S. pressure on Tuesday to freeze regular contacts with Russia until Moscow had withdrawn its troops from Georgia in line with a peace deal. The alliance also agreed to upgrade contacts with Tbilisi but stopped short of accelerating its efforts to join NATO, an ambition which had enraged Russia even before the two-week-old conflict over Georgia's breakaway South Ossetia region.

(Emphasis supplied.) Here is the fun part, NATO's head Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said:

I should add that we certainly do not have the intention to close all doors in our communication with Russia," he said, after several European allies including Britain and Germany expressed doubts about cutting off links with Moscow.

More . . .

Unlike the hysterics we have seen from John McCain, Joe Biden, Wes Clark, Richard Holbrooke and the Beltway foreign policy Establishment, Ed Kilgore points us to Sam Nunn making some sense:

[C]learly the United States need to pause, look and listen before we rush into making Georgia and Ukraine part of NATO. If we’re going to do that, we have to understand that this is a military commitment. And we have to back it up militarily. Right now, we’re not doing well in Afghanistan. Our NATO allies seem to be reluctant to put in more forces. NATO’s got a lot of credibility at stake in Afghanistan. And the defense spending by most of our European allies is way down.

And if you look at the map, you can see pretty quickly that defending Georgia will require enormous expenditures unless we’re going to go back to a Berlin sort of situation, where we threaten to use nuclear weapons in response to conventional progression by the Soviet Union... A wounded bear is going to defend itself. I think Russia’s made a profound mistake, and they’ve got to correct it. [But] we have a real reason to avoid compounding the problem.

h/t andgarden

Kevin Drum say yes. I beg to differ. Kevin writes:

My take, roughly, is that Putin screwed up. . . . Putin got greedy — or just made a mistake — and sent Russian troops into Georgia proper. . . . [I]t succeeded mainly in uniting virtually everyone in outrage against Russian aggression. Putin can pretend all he wants that he doesn't care about Western opinion, but he obviously does — and what's more, Western unity makes a difference in concrete terms too. . . . [I]n the end, the countries on Russia's border are more firmly in our camp now than they were even before the war.

This strikes me as an utter misreading of the situation. I'll explain why on the flip.

At daily kos, the very fine writer Devil's Tower makes the same type of error that the Far Right does when discussing foreign policy, human rights and free markets. Except in reverse. DT writes:

[S]omewhere along the line, we had made a mental connection between capitalism and freedom. Anything good for one was seen as good for the other. We viewed liberty and greed as soul mates. Often enough, we couldn't tell one from the other, and in that confusion we ignored the other half of the struggle -- the one being waged by that still wet behind the ears idea, democracy. In short, we bought our own press.

Fair enough. The silly notion that capitalism and "trade" will necessarily translate into freedom is pernicious. But we can and should recognize this as propaganda while still understanding that both freedom and liberalization of markets will be, in the long run, beneficial to US interests. BTW, it is ALSO propaganda when we discuss it in terms of traditional pet Left causes like lifting the embargo in Cuba (NOTE: I favor lifting the Cuba embargo, but not because it promises freedom for Cuba but because it is an ineffective foreign policy). But we must ALSO understand that a policy for human rights must be tempered by the realities of the national interests of the United States. After all, no one can deny that Iraq is more free today after the toppling of Saddam Hussein. But it also can not be denied that the US is much worse off because of the toppling of Saddam Hussein by the US. More . . .