Iran's End-Run in Iraq
SCHORR, DANIEL
Washington Notebook By Daniel Schorr Iran’s End-Run in Iraq In its Standoff with Iran, the Administration has been raising the temperature to a point where one begins to wonder what it has...
...Yet it is needed more than ever in this complex world...
...Already Senator John McCain of Arizona, the presumptive Republican Presidential candidate, is saying that further troop withdrawals would have “disastrous consequences...
...It is not likely that the regulation-averse Bush Administration will seek supervision of the financial markets...
...This was a significant end-run around the United States in the struggle for influence in the region...
...When thousands of flights involving several airlines are canceled, we learn that they did not meet Federal Aviation Administration inspection standards...
...But perhaps most striking of all was that the Iranian president, speaking in the presence of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, called for the withdrawal of American forces from Iraq...
...Washington Notebook By Daniel Schorr Iran’s End-Run in Iraq In its Standoff with Iran, the Administration has been raising the temperature to a point where one begins to wonder what it has in mind...
...Then Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the Pentagon has military options it could consider against Iran, but the present intention is to rely on diplomatic and economic measures...
...And Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates explained: “I don’t see it as an escalation...
...CBS denied any outside negotiations are going on...
...The United States did not go to war against Saddam Hussein to see Iraqi and Iranian leaders exchanging kisses on their cheeks five years later, or to have Iraqi officials stand by while Ahmadinejad says the Iraqi people do not like Americans...
...The day is long since gone when CBS Chairman William Paley would tell Edward R. Murrow to do his job, and let Paley worry about the revenues...
...Unfazed, Maliki has demonstrated that Iraq is not without other friends...
...relations, irked President Bush...
...Two warring kings in the Olympia area of Greece agreed to suspend fighting that would interfere with athletes and pilgrims traveling to the Games...
...Now Carter himself has taken an action that could make him a casualty of the Logan Act, at least theoretically...
...I remember the spate of suicides on Wall Street, and the men on street corners selling apples...
...No move was made by the White House, though, to take legal steps against the California Democrat...
...And some 25 Democratic candidates for Congress have endorsed what they call “A Responsible Plan to End the War in Iraq...
...More extraordinary in several respects was Ahmadinejad’s two-day trip to Baghdad in early March...
...House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s unauthorized visit to Damascus last year, to discuss improving Syria-U.S...
...It looks like a long, hot summer and fall arguing about troops in Iraq...
...When I was young, we used the word “exclusive” only if our subject did no other interviews...
...It is used when people mean to say “figurative” but want to convey more intensity...
...I have seen a politician do four interviews on a Sunday morning, with each program boasting that it has an “exclusive...
...Ten years ago, after 120 CBS employees were laid off, a rumor floated around that CBS President Mel Karmazin wanted his network to get out of the news business altogether because it could not compete with the 24-hour cable news channels...
...Moreover, although the total audience for evening news shows across all three networks declined by 5 per cent last year, CBS’ share declined by 13 per cent...
...Unofficial voices condemning it will be heard...
...Breaking News, Literally According To the New York Times, CBS News has been in discussions with Time Warner, the owner of CNN, about a possible deal to outsource some of its news operations to CNN...
...objecting to President Ahmadinejad’s speaking at Columbia University, said: “He comes literally with blood on his hands...
...A Pause in Troop Withdrawal Partly Because public attention has shifted to the economy, the Administration has been fairly successful in neutralizing the issue of troops in Iraq...
...Illegal Private Diplomacy There is a Federal statute on the books that might send some of our freelance diplomats to prison for up to three years if it were ever enforced...
...And two African-American competitors flashed a Black Power salute during the national anthem to protest against racism in America...
...In his response, the President spoke about sending a message to Iran to stop its nuclear program...
...He twitted Bush by saying, “We have to ask those who visit secretly why they are doing so...
...President Franklin Delano Roosevelt responded to the credit crisis of his time by closing the banks temporarily and calling on Congress to set up a regulatory system...
...Finally, my greatest peeve of all concerns the word “literal...
...French President Nicolas Sarkozy says he might boycott the opening ceremonies, and European governments are reportedly considering sending a “factfinding mission” to Beijing...
...At his April 29 news conference, President George W. Bush was asked why, eight months after the event, the U.S...
...But the new Baghdad-Tehran relationship contains the seeds of a serious diplomatic setback for the United States in the Middle East...
...President Bush has indicated that there will be a pause in troop withdrawals after July, practically insuring an acrimonious debate at the height of the election campaign...
...It also would mark a shift away from the expectation that the media will operate in the public interest...
...Not true, Hamas says...
...To cite only one example, speaking about poor people who need chemotherapy, he said: “You can literally see the fear and terror in their eyes...
...Then he proceeded to say the Administration would not be thrown off course by fluctuations in public opinion polls...
...Back in January, Senator John Edwards used the word “literally” four times in one speech...
...Called the Logan Act, it was passed in 1799 after Dr...
...CBS Evening News is still in third place...
...Clearly echoes of the American Presidential primary campaign, with its talk of putting pressure on the Maliki government and discussion of ideas for withdrawing American troops, have been heard in Baghdad...
...Senator Joseph Lieberman (I.-Conn...
...President Bush officially accepted the Chinese invitation to the Games last September, and the White House says he is going to Beijing for the sports, not to make a political statement...
...Since then technological advances like the Internet and satellite transmission have siphoned off some of the television news audience, even while operating costs have been increasing...
...That would leave roughly 140,000 troops in Iraq, slightly more than before the surge...
...Full disclosure: I worked at CBS for 23 years (1953-76), and at CNN for six (1979-85...
...As opposed to dead...
...For a nickel each, if memory serves...
...The Chinese news agency has responded by accusing the United States of “the greatest humanitarian disaster in the modern world” in Iraq...
...There was talk of a Logan Act indictment the next year when Jackson visited Havana and invited Fidel Castro to visit the United States, but it quickly abated after he returned to Washington with 48 men freed from Cuban prisons, some of them Americans...
...To restore confidence in the banks, the Federal government set up a system that insured them against going bust...
...The strongest American condemnation of Chinese repression has come from Democrats like Speaker Pelosi and Senator Dianne Feinstein of California...
...This is the closest the Administration has yet come to suggesting the possible use of force against Iran...
...After all, we don’t want to see the return of apple peddlers on street corners, or songs like “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime...
...I am old enough to remember vividly the stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression...
...It’s beginning to look as if Iran is a major beneficiary of the American invasion of Iraq...
...Former President Jimmy Carter said, “I was glad that she went...
...Senator Chuck Hagel (R.-Neb...
...On March 24, President Bush said we simply had to let the dust settle to see where we’re at...
...The United States, with a heavy economic stake in China, seems equally timorous about facing up to China on human rights...
...In return, the banks have had to operate under a Federal regulatory system that keeps them from taking undue risks...
...The Bush Administration has tended to act as though the faltering Iraqi government is totally dependent on the U.S...
...However, some commanders began lobbying for a pause in the drawdown, fearful that rapid reductions would leave the remaining forces dangerously exposed to insurgent action and would hurt morale...
...Both Democratic candidates, Senators Barack Obama of Illinois and Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, have promised to bring American troops home...
...French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner was frank to say to the French newspaper Libération, “We are constrained by a certain number of economic interests in order not to boost unemployment...
...One can’t help speculating about what will happen in the remaining months of the Bush Presidency...
...Peddling Apples on the Corner The Following will undoubtedly stamp me as an unreconstructed liberal...
...The State Department lists China’s human rights record as “poor...
...The law bans private citizens from unauthorized negotiation with foreign governments...
...But suspending troop withdrawals for an indefinite period risks plunging the Iraq war into the middle of the fall campaign...
...Larry King’s program is called Larry King Live...
...Senator Clinton, on a cold night in Iowa, said her supporters at a campaign event were “outside, literally freezing to death...
...Some may remember 1968, when the Games were held in Mexico City despite a campus riot in which many students were killed...
...I remember 1936, when Chancellor Adolf Hitler left the Olympic stadium in Berlin to avoid having to honor a very non-Aryan black American, Jesse Owens, who won four gold medals that year...
...Under the circumstances, no one was inclined to criticize...
...I think it could be seen, though, as a reminder...
...Last September, under pressure from Congress, the President announced he would withdraw five combat brigades, two Marine battalions, and one Marine expeditionary unit by July...
...Not literally, of course...
...The Reverend Jesse Jackson, it will be remembered, went to Syria on his own in 1983 and brought back a captured American flyer, Navy Lieutenant Robert Goodman...
...What will China’s violent crackdown on Tibetans and Chinese dissidents bring...
...In midApril he traveled to Damascus for talks with a leader of the militant Palestinian organization Hamas...
...The Times says a CBS-CNN deal would mark a watershed in broadcast history, a strategic shift in the face of changing market forces...
...In dealing with Hamas, listed by the United States as a terrorist organization, Carter has made his contribution to the anger and confusion of the IsraeliPalestinian crisis...
...The trouble is, diplomatic pressure and sanctions have not accomplished very much...
...More may remember 1972 in Munich, when Arab commandos killed two Israeli athletes...
...But the story rings true...
...When ABC’s Martha Raddatz asked Vice President Dick Cheney about the two-thirds of Americans who say the war in Iraq was not worth fighting, Cheney replied, “So...
...The staging—a red carpet, a band and a motorcade into town—was in stark contrast to President Bush’s secretive helicopter visit to Baghdad...
...In fact, the Administration appears to be going into a defensive crouch...
...Next August, Beijing...
...The White House has indicated that no further action is planned...
...But in modern times the Olympic Truce has been honored in the breach...
...Questions about the infiltration of Iranian arms into Iraq were turned away...
...When a crane topples over in Manhattan, it turns out there was no proper inspection by the responsible city agency...
...Then there was 1980, when President Carter declared a boycott of the Moscow Olympics to protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan...
...has so far withheld his endorsement from McCain, saying, “I think we’re in a quagmire...
...I fear for the undermining of our wonderful English language...
...Joe Doakes is “standing by live...
...He emerged saying that Hamas would accept the right of Israel to live as a neighbor in peace...
...But as the Sherman Antitrust Act shows, the key to a free market is necessary regulation...
...Lincoln, had been sent into the Persian Gulf—adding, as a seeming afterthought, that it was only to relieve a carrier coming off station...
...suddenly released photos of a nuclear reactor under construction in Syria bombed by the Israelis...
...Iran is claiming some of the credit for tamping down violence in Iraq...
...Not only is the Administration worried about Iran’s nuclear program, but the latest State Department report on terrorist threats brands Iran the most active state sponsor of terrorism...
...Here goes anyway...
...We may have gotten a clue on April 9, when the Olympic torch, wending its way from Greece to Beijing, was greeted in San Francisco with anti-China demonstrations...
...He termed the trip counterproductive, saying it would send mixed signals...
...Out of that crisis came one word— “regulation...
...George Logan of Pennsylvania went to Paris to negotiate with the French government about some skirmishes at sea...
...Typically, retrenchment tends to be at the expense of news operations, rather than the stars at the anchor desk...
...But the United States apparently cannot afford the luxury of offending a country that holds so much of America’s economic fate in its hands...
...In the case of today’s credit crisis, we don’t see “runs” on banks such as we saw in 1930 and 1931...
...CBSwas in third place among the three major broadcast networks when it offered Katie Couric a five-year $75 million contract, hoping to improve its position...
...Although the Olympic Games are supposed to be above politics, they are generally rich in political symbolism...
...Since that time, the possibility of a Logan Act indictment has been raised every now and then when a public-spirited citizen decides, without authorization, to try to improve relations with a foreign government or organization...
...Instead, we see the impact of unregulated brokerage firms like Bear Stearns that dabbled in the mortgage market and set off a chain reaction...
...Last time I checked, no one was preparing to throw the Logan book at him...
...He was the first Iranian to visit Iraq since the bitter war the two countries fought in the 1980s...
...One is that it has now become standard practice to announce that a program or interview is “live...
...It would accept a Palestinian state, but would not recognize Israel...
...The problem is Communist China’s new position as an economic powerhouse...
...CNN founder Ted Turner told me of his ambition to acquire a network, but he was never able to raise enough money to attempt a hostile takeover...
...Around the same time, the Pentagon announced a second aircraft carrier, the U.S.S...
...And on April 30, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared that Iran is no longer denoting its petroleum transactions in dollars, which he had called “worthless pieces of paper” last year at a summit meeting of oil-producing countries in Saudi Arabia—the ultimate insult, you might say...
...But not for much longer...
...Then there is the word “exclusive...
...CBS is not confirming any deal with CNN...
...Nevertheless, China, awash in human rights violations, bids the world to come celebrate its booming economy...
...While on the subject of the media, I have a few pet peeves I wish to call to your attention...
...True-blue conservatives abhor regulation...
...President Bush had what the White House described as a “lengthy” phone conversation with Chinese President Hu Jintao, urging restraint in dealing with Tibetan and Chinese dissidents...
...Catch-22 of the Olympics The Olympic Truce it was called...
Vol. 91 • March 2008 • No. 2
