Pro-Dem muckraker, Dan Moldea, warns that a group of ‘former intelligence officers’ is preparing a new anti-Clinton offensive. The strategy: kill Bill to cripple Hillary.
“I have it on very, very good authority that major opposition research has already been conducted on Bill Clinton, and it’s going to be a massive smear campaign against him.”
Read the whole thing, buy some popcorn, and enjoy the show…
Meanwhile, James Wolcott alerts us to lively goings-on at the snappily titled blog ‘John Cole’s Balloon Juice‘, where the combined intellectual might of the US blogosphere is still musing aloud about the (generally reckoned to be rubbish) CNN / YouTube question time for Democrat candidates.
More specifically, they’re wondering how the show might be improved upon if there were to be a Republican variant – and they’re busy dreaming up questions that hard-ass conservatives in the audience (or indeed sending in videos via YouTube) might put to their beloved GOP candidates. Now read on…
Included in Matthew d’Ancona’s highly readable report back from Gordon Brown’s trip to the US – the excellent news that GB has become a devotee of leading 4GW theorist David Kilcullen (about whom we first posted in April):
[Brown] has been impressed by the work of David Kilcullen, a former Australian army officer and academic anthropologist who now works for the US State Department and is the senior counter-insurgency adviser to the multinational force in Iraq. Kilcullen’s core belief is that the war on terror is better described as a ‘global counter-insurgency’: he refers to the ‘information battlefield’ but insists that the West’s strategy must be radically localised; each region, each village, needs a different counter-terrorist tactic.
The Brown camp agrees that the propaganda campaigns adopted by Bush’s long-time ally Karen Hughes, the US under-secretary for public diplomacy and public affairs, have been much too centralised and old-fashioned. The Kilcullen Doctrine on winning ‘hearts and minds’ is based not on making local people feel affection for you, but on persuading them that you can protect them better than the enemy. In Iraq, Kilcullen wrote in June, ‘protecting and controlling the population is do-able, but destroying the enemy is not’.
Meanwhile, young Muslims drawn to the flames of Islamism — in West Yorkshire as much as Basra — have to be targeted for ‘ideological conversion’, a process Kilcullen compares to the tactics used to keep young men out of street gangs. Easier said than done, of course. But this is the way Brown’s counter-terrorist thinking is heading: away from invasions, ‘crusades’, and ‘shock and awe’ and towards something that owes much more to a Cold War theorist such as George Kennan than it does to Donald Rumsfeld or, indeed, to Tony Blair.
A breathtakingly thuggish op-ed on the ‘special relationship’ between the UK and US in the FT today. The author? John Bolton, who these days is a senior fellow somewhere or other.
According to Bolton, the UK needs to take two teensy weensy steps to keep the relationship fresh:
Laughably, Bolton tries to present his position as reflective of a bipartisan consensus in the US, while pompous to the last, he offers to wait a while (“but not forever”) for the British PM to pledge allegiance to neo-conservative orthodoxy.
I am sure Bolton’s screed is being read with great seriousness in Downing Street – 2 or 3 microseconds of attention at least. Then Brown’s team will get back to the serious business of working out how they can:
The FT is offering all and sundry the chance to put questions to Bolton in an ‘ask the expert’ session (expert in what? one wonders). Ask your questions here…
Celebrated climate scientist James Hansen has blunt tidings in the last edition of New Scientist: “I find it almost inconceivable that ‘business as usual’ climate change will not result in a rise in sea level measured in metres within a century.”
(Wondering how a 5 metre rise would affect you? This excellent hacked version of Google Maps has the answer.)
Bottom line on what needs to be done to avoid this, according to Hansen:
The global community must aim to restrict any further global warming to less than 1 °C above the temperature in 2000. This implies a CO2 limit of about 450 parts per million or less.